


(Old) Genesis

by SomeoneImSure



Series: Experimental Stories [3]
Category: Transformers (Bay Movies), Transformers - All Media Types, Transformers Generation One, Transformers: Prime
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen, Human Turned Transformer, Multi, Mystery, Rape, Transfan Turned Transformer
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-11
Updated: 2015-04-07
Packaged: 2018-03-01 00:45:51
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 15
Words: 77,391
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2753321
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SomeoneImSure/pseuds/SomeoneImSure
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>NOTE: A newer REwritten version will be posted sometime June, 2016, and will become canon in this series. This version of the story will remain up but will hopefully disappear into the background like a good sludge story.</p><p>[AU] A transfan gets hit by a car and wakes up in the distant past as a Cybertronian. Before she can figure it out, she gets thrust into the middle of a war and is forced to chose between saving Earth and her twin. </p><p>"Sometimes we don't meet our heroes until it's already too late. Sometimes… we have to become the hero. And it always tears us apart."<br/>~ Windcatcher</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Awakening

**Author's Note:**

> EDIT: I still stand by what I said before. That’s why I have decided to rewrite Genesis. I never said I was going to be the most amazing, spectacular or best writer out there - I am an amateur in every sense of the word. I have an ego, I will admit, but that doesn’t mean that I won’t take people’s critiques seriously. 
> 
> I had mixed feelings when I finished Genesis the first time; I knew at the time that it wasn’t my best work and that I could seriously do way better, which is why I have decided to go back at it again. This time, I hope to have learned from my failings and transform this story from a series of oneshots into a flowing narration. But I believe that my terribleness at this fic needs some deserved explanation for those of you who were hoping for something and found yourself reading just another load of sludge on the internet.
> 
> Before I had started Genesis, I had already attempted something similar in another fandom which, like this story, had left me with equally mixed feelings. I didn’t know what I was doing wrong and I hated how the story had ended up, plus I had somehow gotten it in my head that I needed to start a sequel to it. I took that story down shortly after starting the second book and decided to try a new approach to writing a story. That was this story.
> 
> And for the majority of this story I was basically writing by the seat of pants, allowing the whim to guide me instead of actually developing the story/outline beforehand (like a smart person). It really bit me in the aft and now that I have finished it, I’m not really surprised that I don’t like it. I almost never went back over what I wrote because I didn’t particularly care about anything but the details (which bogged down my writing tremendously) and I am still surprised this garnered such a reaction on Fanfiction.net! I guess this goes to show me that people will accept pretty much anything over there, which is disturbing.
> 
> That’s when I knew I had to rewrite it, no matter how many people said it was well done or good. I had to get this right and if I couldn’t do it the first time then I must do it the second - if only to calm my own feelings on the whole issue. As a result, I divorce this story from the canon of T0RN and replace it with a (hopefully) better flowing narrative, edited by one of the best writers in the fandom that I know of.
> 
> I will have that story posted sometime in the month of June, 2016. Subscribe to the series T0RN if you are interested in it for when it first comes out. 
> 
> Regardless of that, you have my deepest and most profound apologies for creating this terrible mess of a narrative. I will take this story and improve upon it in every way that I am able, and hope you are willing to give me chance to show you what I am truly capable of. And even if you turn away now, I wish to thank you for reading this note and I wish you to have an awesome day.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Astroseconds = about 1 microsecond.  
> Klik = 1.2 minutes  
> Breem = 8.3 minutes. | 7 kliks.  
> Joor = 6.5 hours. | 47 breems.  
> Orn = 13.5 days. | 50 joors.  
> Deca-Orn = 135 days. | 500 joors./10 orns.  
> Vorn = 83 years. | 225 deca-orns.  
> Stellar Cycles =1079 years. | 13 vorns

STASIS LOCK… CANCELLED.

Her vision flickered before her as her mind was unhappily pulled from the blissful darkness. Memories surged out to the forefront of her mind, scattering before her like dust thrown onto a rock before suddenly disappearing into the cracks of her mind. Her vision fizzled tiredly and she blinked, staring out over the darkness towards dark twisting shadows in the night.

 _Who am I?_ she wondered, wincing as alien thoughts streamed through her head, computer responses snapping off at her in cold detachment.

_You are Rhythm._

Her first impulse was to say " _No, I'm not_ " but she realized the voice was not something she could argue against. She reached out a hand towards the berthside tray, her optics locked on the moving limb with surprise as the tray wobbled under its grip. A dirk danced on the metal surface, glowing blue and polished metal blade gleaming from the darkness and highlighting her limb. She jerked her hand back, but halted when the limb in front of her echoed the movement. She raised her servo in front of her face.

 _What am I?_ she wondered, dreading the answer. She recognized the five digit servo of a Cybertronian hand.

 _Terran_ , came the response. She huffed, annoyed.

 _I didn't used to be metal,_ she rephrased, looking at the other berths in the room. Four bodies stood outlined on their surfaces, gleaming medical equipment showing off sharp armor and kibble. She didn't recognize their subtle shapes.

 _Do I know them?_ she wondered. _Do they know what happened to me? Did it happen to them?_

Question rushed through her mind, her curiosity perked. She rose of the table, stumbling and sitting hurriedly back down. Her balance was off, and she felt something new attached to her back move. Turning her helm, she spotted the outline of a squarish wing on her back. The winglets twitched in response to her emotions, calm curiosity echoing every fiber of her being. She tilted her helm, and watched the doorwings preform a similar action right back at her. She was amused, and watched her doorwings echo the motion.

She tried to arrest control of them as she stood, staggering forward a step as they struggled to comply and balance her. When she straightened, she wobbled a little but was pleased that she could stand. It felt right, but at the same time wrong, like she shouldn't be able to stand right now. It was a baffling feeling that caused her tanks to stir uncomfortably, and she found herself pushing it aside. She could figure that out later. Right now, she needed to know what was going on _over there_ where the bodies lay. She put one pede in front of the other, wobbling slightly. Her servos spread and arms pulled away from her body to help balance her. Venting deeply, she took a few quick steps, wobbling when she halted mid-step. Something about speed helped her quickly get her balance and she was pleased that she didn't fall. She held her servos out, her doorwings spreading behind her automatically for balance.

CALIBRATING. . .

She thought the words scrolling across her screen seemed unnatural, but right at the same time. Ignoring them, she groped the side of the berth and crawled up it to the side of the seeker, throwing her legs over the side of the berth. She glanced over the slender figure and feminine features and guessed it was a femme. She glanced down at herself, and her lip twisted in a sneer of distaste. She did not have a feminine body, but a bulky mech body. Her optics returned to the femme seeker on the berth and scanned her features. The slender elegant faceplate sparked a cord in a memory and she frowned as images went through her mind. An organic fleshy creature looked remarkably similar to this seeker and she knew she had to be related to the seeker. After all, she had been related to the organic.

Frowning at that strange thought - how could a Cybertronian be related to an organic? - when she realized something else. Most of her memories were from the view of an organic. She _had_ been an organic.

 _What happened to me_ _?_ she wondered, turning towards her memories. The last few moments of her organic life she remembered.

She remembered _dying_. Pain cracking through her chest and swelling agony spreading across her face. She was staring through the window shield of a car, a driverless car. _How odd_ , she had thought _._ Of course, now she realized that the driver had probably walked out of the car to check up on the woman who was plastered to his grill and hood. _  
_

She remembered swimming in an abyss of darkness, remembered wondering how ironic her death had been, before she had forgotten everything. Pain had existed in the darkness.

 _So, I wasn't dead,_ she thought. Then what was she? How did she become like this?

It was a nice distracting mystery and it made her wonder if something similar had happened to _... Rhyme_.

The name jolted her as another swath of memories suddenly shattered her mind. She was once _human_ , a transfan of the very Cybertronians whose species she now shared. It wasn't just some odd thing that had happened, it was practically impossible. She searched her memories for something that could explain her transformation but the usual suspects weren't in any of her memories.

Her optics scrutinized the seeker before her, catching the familiar purple-blue paint which covered the femme's body. She recognized those colors from her sister's artwork - her _twin_. Her optics searched over the bodies of the others, recognizing each face as a human she had once known, though everyone else was just a best friend. Oracle, Hex, and Calypso. One helicopter, another seeker, and a doorwing-less grounder. They were all here.

 _And where is here?_ she wondered, suspicious. She didn't think her friends would be in stasis if their benefactor was a nice guy.

Her optics landed on what could be a door. It was large and round with a familiar symbol on the front, though it was heavily scratched up, disguising its shape. She wondered if she would be next, and she moved forward to press her servo against the door. A door panel blinked on when she neared and she changed course to investigate the buttons. Alien glyphs covered the panel, and she found that she understood them. She pressed her digit over the open glyph and the door swished apart. A long dark purple hallway greeted her, the Decepticon-esque color instantly causing her to tense. She moved back towards the room and picked up the dirk and a hunting knife from the tray. Having no place to put them and unsure how to use her subspace, she simply kept them in her fists.

The hallways were deserted, a few broken crates and datapads, lost various items just lying around, bespoke of life that had once filled the corridors long ago. A few of the rooms were filled with more equipment, all broken or unkempt, and a few of the rooms themselves were crushed, with slivers of rock shining through. She got the impression she was buried beneath tons and tons of land and she shuddered, think of all that wait pressing down on her from above. Then, she stumbled upon the Observation Deck.

The Observation Deck was the command center of what had once been a very large and heavily manned Cybertronian vessel. The room was divided into two platforms, the smaller one raised over the first and connected to an entirely different level than the bottom one. A throne was rooted to the middle of the upper platform, raised so that not a single mech manning the room could be missed. Underneath the platform was only enough room to stand and walk around in, with no equipment and an entire area cleared out and dropped away, slopping into a smaller clear area. Every chair in the room pointed towards the massive windows which pointed towards the outside.

Her first thought was that she was inside a giant pool of water, but the oceanic view was more blue than chlorine green. She could see the sunlight in the water and coral reefs disappearing off into the distance. It was a beautiful world of color, with blue-gray fish and colorful fauna swimming leisurely around in the distance. It rippled with the under water currents, bending to its own watery winds and swaying gently. The she-mech took in a deep breath, awed by the sight of so much beauty.

 _Where am I_ _?_ she wondered, noticing a particular fish that reminded her of a deep sea bass though it was remarkably different. _When am I?_

_How did I get here?_

There were too many questions to ask and only so much to do about them. She returned to the not-quite-a-medbay where she had woken up. Her sisters were there, their perplexing position only causing more confusion. She recalled the accident, remembering what it felt like and feeling the soft burn in her spark, an echo of the damage done. She rewound the memory to a few minutes before.

It was raining heavily that night. She remembered the darkness she had to peer through in order to see her sister, on the other side of the street. She walked when the walk light turned into a green man and her sister had walked forward to meet her. Except, she never made it that far.

Her ears had heard the sound before her eyes had, and the instant she saw the lights approaching too fast, she had sped up. Her sister had stopped in the middle of the road, looking up at the approaching danger. She was rooted to the spot, knowing death was coming towards her.

She had slammed into her sister, pushed her aside just as the car appeared out of the darkness. The bright lights blinded her, just before the pain swept through her chest.

She shuddered at the memories, though pleased that she had reacted so swiftly to save her sister. But it begged the question. If she was dead, what was she doing here?

The obvious conclusion was that her entire human life was a dream, a simulation, but she didn't want to believe it. Too much had happened in her human life, too many details that were too much for an alien species bent on creating an illusionary world. She somehow doubted that any Cybertronian would put that much effort in an organic simulation when more important simulation could have been used. If the idea was propaganda, then it wouldn't have bothered making her an organic. She'd have been Cybertronian, but forced to endure the propaganda at a young age. Young impressionable minds were more susceptible to change than older ones.

She frowned at this, recalling every story she'd ever read on Transformers. She double checked them, making sure that she only had data on the ones she had read instead of the ones she had just seen the summary for. If she really had been in a simulation, it made sense that the stories that she had only seen summaries for would also be in her databanks, as if she had already read them. There was no such discrepancies. She didn't know how to deal with that.

It only confirmed to her that her human life hadn't been a simulation. It just couldn't be, not when so much evidence said it wasn't. So, what did that make everything around her?

She returned to the oceanic view and sat sideways on the throne, her legs falling over the sides as she leaned up against the other arm rest, propped up on her elbows. The sea was beautiful, but alien to her. It was much more cleaner and lighter than it should have been from this distance, with almost no amount of salt content. It almost looked new.

She wasn't overly Christian, but it made sense to her that this would be the earliest parts of Genesis, before the flood happened, if this was Earth. It didn't match up with what evolutionists said, but when she looked at the animals she guessed that some form of micro-evolution was indeed involved, if any of these creatures were ancestors of the fish she remembered from her research as a human.

She climbed down from her perch, having her full of the strange beautiful sight before her. She dropped off the platform and cozied up to the arch of alien consoles before her. The strange alien language was quickly translated, and she palmed the computer online. A holographic screen appeared before her, giving her three dimension image of a familiar alarming insignia - the Decepticon insignia. She jerked her hands away, afraid that the Decepticons might have booby trapped the system and left something that would cause the ship to explode. When nothing happened, she struggled to put down the uncomfortable sensation in her tanks and palm through the computer data, wondering what had happened to the ship.

But what she found was something she would later learn she had forgot. She had learned too much and it slipped from her digits like metal filings, unable to find purchase in her mind. The download was visual, but because it had no prior data to latch onto, the information upload failed to be received as such. Her processor adjusted to recognize the data, but most of it had already slipped away into the darkness, leaving her with a vague impression of _something_.


	2. Promises

_A note to my younglings, when you find this journal entry – I apologize for deceiving you. It is natural for my kind to do that, unfortunately, and I detest the fact that I had to degrade myself to_ Their _methods in order to create you._ He _has to be stopped and this was the only way to do it._

 _You must protect The Secret. You must not allow for anyone to know about it, in case it gets discovered by_ Him _._ He _will use it poorly, in every way it is_ NOT _supposed to be used, and_ He _will destroy it, and that would destroy any chance we have of restoring Primus to His Golden Self._

 _I know you will be confused, my younglings. I know you will not understand and might never understand why I had to do what I did, but I leave my mission in your servos anyway. It is imperative that you tell no one of this. No one. Not even the Prime. If any word of the Secret reaches_ Him _then our cause is lost._

 _Please, my daughters,_ protect this _Secret and all information surrounding it with your_ **life** _._

* * *

Fifty years had passed since she had found the message.

It had been strange to grasp, how time flew after her transformation. A human's life time was reduced to a month - it flew by so quickly and yet not quickly enough.

She had done some renovating when she wasn't trying to decipher the message. The walls had all been repainted black, both to symbolizing mourning for the life she had left behind and because it was her favorite color. It reminded her of the dark night she had died and the mystery she had yet to solve. She set up shop in her new room, while also promising to visit the not-quite-a-medbay regularly to check up on her comatose twin and friends. It was after a while she began noticing something off with herself, as she slowly became aware of the physical bond they now shared. Their sparks were tied together, but for what purpose, she was unable to decide on.

She hadn't gotten a visit from Primus or the Primes, and it was disconcerting to remain without answers for so long. When awake, she found small things to do. She learned to reverse engineer the door panels and rebuilt them - somewhat. They weren't all working at optimum level when she was through, but she didn't care. Most of the doors led to nowhere's ville anyway.

She collected and harbored datapads, rebuilting them from pieces and parts after she had reverse engineered one. She managed, more successfully, to put them together and get them functioning at optimum level. They were quickly filled with her writings. Even after becoming a Transformer, she couldn't leave the fanwriter's world too far behind her.

Whenever a problem occurred in the daily routine that had become her life, she became excited at the prospect of something new to do. When the energon supply was running low, she endeavored to stock herself back up on energon. There were moments of weirdness too. Whenever she came across a problem she had no way of solving, she discovered some new avenue of the base she hadn't found before and discovered a new batch of whatever it was she was missing. It was convenient. She looked at every new thing she found with growing suspicion, wondering if there was something on board the ship she had missed. But after fifty years of not seeing a single soul, she found that possibility less and less likely.

A few hours of the day she dedicated to self-maintenance. It was annoying, constantly removing and putting on her armor in order to clean her protoform. To save herself the hassel, she simply kept her armor off. Since no one was around to see her "naked" anyway, it didn't bother her. Her underarmor was extremely sensitive, but she learned to tune it out over time.

Her recharge was peaceful. She dropped into a dead sleep every night, with no dreams. It was almost disappointing, but reasonable. She worked her butt off every night, as if afraid that if she was one iota less tired when she finally retired to the berth, she would have nightmares. She never bothered with an internal chronometer, going to bed only when she felt really tired. It screwed up her sleeping schedule, if that even mattered now that she was a Cybertronian. Occasionally, she didn't make it to the berth before her recharge cycle kicked in, usually when her attention was buried in this or that. For some reason, she always woke up in the berth. It took it happening the second time for her to actually notice.

She did everything she could to cover up the silence. Wherever she went, a deathly silence had fallen over the whole base. Her pedesteps sounded unnaturally loud and her venting sounded strangely panicky. Every so often, she found herself tuning into the world and the deathly silence and hearing something new - something on the edge of her hearing that she couldn't name. It turned out to be nothing every time, a trickle of water here or there that led to her discovering a room that she could have sworn she had never seen before and that was currently up to her ankles in water. She shuddered and left well enough alone, paranoia warring with curiosity and a deep sense of foreboding. The latter was sometimes enough to shut up the other two, but sometimes curiosity won. Her paranoia grew stronger with each passing day, threatening to overrun curiosity and demand Rhythm do something she would most likely regret.

It only punctuated how _alone_ she was. It had never bothered her before. She spent so much time doing the mundane just distracting herself from the growing loneliness eating away at her mind and heart. She was balanced on the crisp edge of sanity and she had no idea what would finally cause her to snap. And the longer she remained underground the more she became worried that she losing her sanity. Perhaps the noises she kept hearing at the edge of her hearing was confirmation?

Or perhaps going insane from loneliness was just a human problem, one that Cybertronians didn't have to deal with? They were machines, albeit sentient ones. Did they suffer when they were alone? The ship was empty and devoid of motion. There was no one to talk to, no one to have conversations with, no one to hang out with or even just to play a simple, silent game of chess. Primus, she would have enjoyed Prowl's company! Preferred it, to this dreary underwater world of isolation.

Her gaze shifted to the massive glass window before her. She had grown tired of the fish. There was only so much fish behavior she could stand before she started predicting the patterns. A few fish personalities were new and interesting, but it was usually the Downright-Timid, Not-as-Timid, and Mr-I-Don't-Give-A-Hoot-About-Anyone-Because-I'm-So-Big-And-Bad. The later had a tendency to not really care about the curiosity on the other side of the glass, but his very presence was enough to scare all the other fish away, leaving her devoid of tiny fish friends and what little entertainment she had when she had nothing to do.

Her optics had adjusted to the growing darkness which had consumed the sea, transforming the pool-like atmosphere into a underwater sea, and she was able to tell slight variations in light which gave away the days and nights happening far overhead. She even began to recognize the slight variations that told her whether it was stormy overhead, and it helped when some of the fish disappeared for hours on end for no reason. They knew the storm was coming and their absence was telling. When she had first begun observing them, she had no idea she had startled fish with her presence until some of them started appearing very near her window. These fish were easily startled at her presence, and she had to give fishermen her respect for having the patience for their trade.

The silence gave volumes to her thoughts, and they tended to drown out the world. She had never thought so much before in her life until she was introduced to the silence. Sometimes she'd flounder through the sea of thoughts, drowning, before she registered land off in the distance and found herself clawing up its sandy slopes. This time, when she pulled herself from her thoughts, she saw something new. A feeling of foreboding had rolled into the air; the animals had all disappeared. Something new had crossed over into her part of the sea, casting an unusual shadow on the darkness of the ocean. She lifted her head out of her arms and knees, gazing almost emotionless towards the source of the disturbance.

The fish had vanished; that single school of bright colored glow-in-the-dark fish that normally lurked around during certain days of the year suddenly disappeared a few days too early. She couldn't see any fish in the deep dark depths of the sea; the faintly-glowing ever-present mass of moss and sponge faintly lit up an entirely desolate atmosphere. It was empty, as if every creature had packed up and moved to Spain while she had her back turned. She stood up and leaned out over the consoles, her helm tilted upwards towards barely there light of the surface.

She had once wondered if it was possible to measure the depths of the sea according to the light that managed to leak in from above. It was possible and, even though she wasn't a mathematics genius capable of preforming the calculations, her systems did the calculations in Cybertronian automatically for her.

The observation deck was silent except for the barely-audible sound of metal shifting. In the silence, it was audio-shattering. Her knees and hips shifted uncomfortably in the dark. It reminded her that she was alone, like a punch to the gut. She ignored the feeling in her stomach and focused her complete attention on the outside world and those subtle changes.

Something had blacked out the daylight, making the deep sea a few shades darker than normal. It was almost pitch-black, and that prompted her to step forward, pressing up against the window and gazing upwards.

Black silhouettes, massive flippers and tails marking them as aliens amongst the normal marine life.

Whales.

The mammal's low song sent vibrations through the glass and she shuddered. They lumbered along, unfamiliar shapes casting dark shadows across lands that didn't recognize them. Power and size rolled from their beings like waves, terrifying those creations they would never cause harm. They were in families, one not too far behind the other.

Orcas. Their black and white bodies screamed danger to the darker greys of the larger wales. They moved swiftly, dolphins amongst the much larger mammals, playful but outcasted because of their colors. Seal-eaters; strangers in a strange land.

She was hit with wave of desire. She wanted to be among them, one of them, free and playful. She wanted their safety and protection. She wanted to be able to feel that freedom.

She wanted –

A bright blue beam suddenly shot out of the ship at the nearest orca, startling it and startling her as she clapped servos over her optics. A blueprint appeared in her mind of the orca, its massive limbs and all its muscle tissue. Suddenly, the organic mass had transformed in her head, from organic meat to much more acceptable metal. It burned in her mind before minimizing into the corner of her sight. She heard the suddenly much louder sound of her gears, as her protoform shifted. She staggered back, surprised.

As it slowly sank in, she began to laugh. It was absurd! After eighty-three years of living alone on-board, she had finally acquired a transformation sequence? _Seriously?_ She just wanted to laugh. She laughed at her own startlement at the sudden transcan, laughed at the absurdity of not having discovered or even thought about it sooner, and laughed because she couldn't stop. It hurt almost, and it took a lot of calming breaths to bring herself back down. Her vents hurt. She uncurled her arms around her chassis.

What else lay out there in the world?

She sighed, and straightened. Her mind had sharpened with intent. She turned on her heels, marching deeper into the core of the ship.

* * *

Putting on armor after a new transcan hurt. It was tricky to do, but after she had connected the armor to the right spot it had reshaped itself to the new transcan. It took a lot of reattaching and attaching before she had herself in the right order. Even then, her armor felt weird, but she could move all her limbs without her armor chaffing so everything seemed in order. She made a mental note to not transcan in her underarmor again, to save from the hours of working on her armor.

She wanted to curse herself for not coming up with the idea of transcanning sooner. She had been lazying around too much, she told herself. It had cost her time. She promised herself that she would never do that again.

When she had finished dressing up in her new black and white armor, a full day had passed. She pulled out a few old datapads and connected them together on a table in her giant berth room. A few blueprints had appeared, of all the areas she had explored on the ship and all the areas that had collapsed for one reason or another or were just off-limits. She pushed a white stylus over the images, drawing notes on the surface in a tiny scrawl.

Even though she couldn't speak Cybertronian, it's language was integrated into her system. She could write it as easily as she could write English or Japanese, but just like Japanese, she could only write it. She couldn't speak it at all.

After everything had been drawn out, she found herself beginning the first stages of her makeshift plan; digging a hole through the bottom of the ship and tunneling back upwards through to the ocean. The ship's pocket of air would keep out the water, but the tunnel would fill up with water, leaving the rest of the ship untouched. However, that's assuming she wasn't currently existing in a vacuum. She would have to make a system to convert the hydrogen and oxygen molecules of water into a gas, to keep the water out and prevent future rust or problems in the electrical system.

Drilling downwards wouldn't be easy either. It would cause cracks to appear in the ship's infrastructure. Perhaps a compound could be used to coat the ship, preventing it from being damaged by the drill. She didn't know the structure integrity of the ship, though she had to guess it was pretty good, to have survived so far. It was a Cybertronian alloy, after all.

She tapped the datapads thoughtfully with the stylus. There was no win-win situation here. She couldn't get out of the ship without causing some areas of the ship to flood. She twirled the stylus thoughtfully before pounding the tip into a room on the blueprint, drawing a star. It would be the first room she'd test to see if it lead to the outside.

A few minutes later, she was standing in the room marked on the datapad. Picking up a sharp shard of metal, she scrapped her plans out on a wall. It had a door panel she had gutted a few years back, which would make it difficult to seal when the time came. Her optics searched the walls for bad spots, noting the areas that would give out easily under the pressure. She was on one of the lowest levels of the ship, as far as she knew. She would dig down here for about fifty yards, then continue digging at a ninety degree angle away from the ship.

She would have to modify the room first. Prepare it for an airlock attachment just in case.

She put the stylus in her mouth before turning to paint the walls with a white metallic paint, beginning the first blueprints on the walls for her to glance at as she worked. When she was done, she disappeared back to her room to look over the datapads and mark the rooms filled with scraps from collapsed segments of the ship. She'd use them in the construction process.

* * *

It had taken a few months, but she finally finished. She had discovered a long hunting knife on the table beside her medical berth, that she used to help cut the pieces down to size. Most of the medical tools were pulled out from the medical sections, and a few other tools she had found lying around came in handy during the process. The finished product was a mount ready to hook up to an airlock, with all the seams around it coated in a twisted metal sludge that was still drying. She tinkered with the wires, glancing occasionally at the designs on the walls. She completed the airlock, installing the door last and all at the same time.

She had double checked _everything_ , but she still had her doubts about it. This was a little bit more complicated for her normal skillset. Her sister was the engineer, she was just the business manager.

_Couldn't have gotten through your first year of college, could you have? No, you had to be the hero._

She shook the thought off, and looked over her handy work. The airlock plans were already made, and they were extremely simple compared to the technology around her. It would be pumping out water and pumping in air from the tunnels.

Shifting on her pedes, she twirled her knife, letting the blue glowing light flashing in the darkness. It would cut through the hull like it was butter. She looked over the door, scanning it and making sure the seal would hold. She backed up, turning away from the door to slash through the floor. She ran a digit over the twisted metal, pulling up one layer to reveal the wires underneath. They were closely packed together, and it took a long while to push them aside and pack them into the walls without damaging them. She pushed and twisted the metal over the rim of the opening, leaving a hole through it large enough for her to fall through. The last layer was easy to slice through, but the other side was a dark cave.

Pausing in her attack on the metal, she sat back and adjusted her plans. If she could discover that the ship was partially buried in a mountain, then she could dig outwards and find a tunnel to the surface.

She put up the knife and leaped down into the tunnel, landing in a crouch and looking around. Her optics had adjusted to the darkness, and she stood up to explore the tunnels. It lead upwards into a small cavern. She calculated the level of terrain and determined which wall she had to dig out to arrive back in the room with the airlock. Form there, it was a simple matter of digging. She pulled out the knife and began hacking at the earth, loosening up the tightly packed soil and causing it to spill over onto the ground.

* * *

She pulled out a long cable behind her as she moved out of the now open area connecting the cavern to the airlock. It had taken a week to complete the small tunnel, with only her knife to aid her. The unnatural tunnel ended in an even more unnatural airlock. The flat cable looked like a flatworm following closely behind her. She had the whole thing mostly wrapped up and magnetically attached to her hip. The other end was wrapped around a stalagmite.

She had silently sworn never to swim in the sea. She had a tendency to run away from things and going out to sea was just another way to run away.

 _It's best to investigate each tunnel separately_ , she decided. She pulled out an energon cube and sipped it, looking over the other tunnels in the cavern. She had no idea which one lead to the surface, and the only way to find out was to explore them. Spelunking gear in place, she was more than prepared to leave. But she wasn't entirely ready. Her optics shifted towards the airlock door, and she was uncomfortable leaving her 'home' behind her, especially considering her sisters were still in it.

"I'll be back," she promised, frowning as her voice echoed around the tunnel. It sounded strange to her. Her voice didn't sound like her own. It was deeper, more baritone. Almost like a male's.

She shook herself. Verbal farewells probably weren't the best idea right now anyway.

She let a length of cable fall behind her as she disappeared into the darkness of the tunnels. She shuddered at the unnatural silence, carefully trying not to think of what might lurk in those dark twisting shadows. She kept her optics forward and stubbornly refused to look back as she marched into the dark unknown.

Her doorwings flickered behind her. They proved to be more useful now than they ever been. Unlike inside the dark ship's hull, the air moved through the tunnels, whispering their secrets into her doorwing's sensors. The further she went into the tunnels, her doorwings began to twitch toward the movement of air, moving back and forth in sync with each other as she hunted down the source of the wind. Wind meant air, air meant atmosphere, atmosphere meant surface.

Her pace began to quicken, her mind bent over the task of walking and dropping line, following the gentle tug of the sensors in her doors telling her that the surface was _that_ way or _this_ way. She was beginning to wonder when she would stop hearing the strange and unnerving sound of her own pedesteps echoing back at her from the dark. Occasionally, she halted, doorwings fluttering back and forth, audios struggling to identify some new sound or another. Every echo sounded skewed; drops of water sounded like high-pitched gunshots, pedesteps seemed to come up behind her, and every squeak transformed into the subtle snarls of a monster waiting around the bend.

When the blacks and blues suddenly gave way to greys, she let out a strange choked sound that caused her to freeze. Her doorwings twitched, her audios whirled, but the tunnels behind her remained silent. She began walking again, carefully placing her pedes and tiptoeing around the rocks.

Zoink!

She came to abrupt halt one pedestep away from light grey, her line gone taunt behind her. She frowned, mentally retracing her steps and cursing herself for not having pulled the line taunt before going around the corners. She would have more length now if she had done that. Sighing, she uncoiled the end around her waist, tied it into a loop and flung it over the nearest stalagmite. She paused on the edge of the light-grey, before slowly moving forward into the light, unaware of her own pedesteps growing steadily faster.

Sunlight gleamed from far overhead as Sol inched towards what could only be the west, and if another joor had passed she would have walked straight into one beautiful sunset. Stretching her limbs, she relaxed in the sunlight, before seeking out a nice warm spot beside the cave's entrance to lean back and watch the show.

It had been too long since she had seen the sunset.

* * *

The morning was misty, with the glorious sunrise casting the side of the mountain into deep dark shadows. She marched out into the forest, finishing her energon cube. She didn't want to faint again, especially not out here where predators might be lurking. Even though she had perfect memory, she used her hunting knife to mark every other tree as she made her way through the forest, quickly leaving the mountain far behind her. Her common sense told her that she needed to know the lay of the land, in case she had to escape some thing or another. It would be nice to find all the hiding places.

She walked through the forests, feeling like she was walking through a fairytale. She felt strange to be surrounded by the wide open spaces, like she was being introduced to a dream. After adjusting to the new atmosphere, she found herself relaxing for the first time. The chirping of distant birds was a faint reminder that she wasn't alone. If she adjusted her hearing just right, she could hear the sound of the whales at sea.

When she finally had her fill of the peace, night descended over the land. She decide to go rock climbing, wondering if she could beat the human record of climbing a mountain in six minutes. She didn't beat the record, her inexperience slowing her down, but she made it in half an hour thanks to her tireless body. It was nice to stretch her limbs and work pistons she hadn't even known she had.

She took to the shores next, walking up and down the full length of the beach and watching the moon's reflection in the water. The rhythmic sounds of the waves made her think of home, and that made her thoughts turn to her sisters. Unnerved and mood effectively killed, she moved back up the beach to the forest and settled down on a boulder beside her mountain. It was peaceful and untouched by alien hands, a perfect place to hang out during the days and nights away from 'home'.

When she ran out of energon, she retraced her steps back down the cable and retrieved a few cubes from the reserves before returning to the surface for another day of entertainment. She stayed away from the ocean, not wanting to be reminded of the lake. Days trickled by and transformed into weeks, then months and then years. She kept expanding her territory, underground and above it, memorizing and mapping every inch of the nearby wilderness before returning to the ship for a break.

Before she knew it, she had spent a whole other vorn doing nothing. She had traveled out into the territory as far as she was willing to go, resting on a boulder in woody grove, placing another blue cube to her lips and staring listlessly off into the distant horizon. She drank slowly and found herself quickly losing track of time. She wasn't even paying attention to her surroundings anymore. She had no one to blame but herself for what would steal her life away the next vorn.

He emerged out of the darkness of night, his masculine spark signature expanding out too far past normal self-respecting boundaries, stroking her own female signature and yanking her out of her thoughts instantly. It took a moment for her to orient herself, before her red gaze fell on twin blue optics.

He smiled a smile that was more of leer, and she saw no real friendliness in his burning blue optics.


	3. Unsettling

It was a blur. The moment he had come into sight, the moment he had stepped into the clearing, his optics landing on her and her optics landing on the purple insignia on his chest, she had reacted.

A bright flash of light over her optics was the only thing that halted her. It was too reminiscent of the time in the dark night, when she had saved her sister. In a second, she was back in control, staring down at the dead body in shock and disgust. Flecks of pink liquids flashed on the surface of her blue hunting knife, her dirk nowhere to be found. She could only guess it was buried somewhere deep within the body of the mech.

Where his purple insignia had once been was a fresh, open wound, the round hole exactly where his spark should have been. The sight probably would have made her vomit, if she was anymore squeamish. Instead, she simply stared, detached, at the pooling pink and blue fluids as the mech, unwilling to grasp that _she_ had done this.

Something dark and mysterious had grabbed a hold of her, wrested her out of her own control and taken her body for a joyride. She didn't know whether to be angry at this whatever-it-was or grateful. It had all happened so fast and she could barely come up with any reason for it. What could she had seen that had made her go ballistic? There were no weapons on his person. He was entirely unharmed. The only thing which might have triggered it was the Decepticon insignia, which had been ripped off and torn apart into a hundred pieces. The more she looked over the mech, the more she realized that she had just commited murder. It was not self-defense, but perhaps a primal instinct to kill that had aroused from nothing and slaughtered her would-be enemy. A cold chilling fear gripped her tanks as she imagined for a moment her dark beast being unleashed inside of the ship and she wished for a moment that she had never left that ship, paranoia be damned.

But if she had discovered this on the ship, what consequences would have transpired? It would have been worse if she had gone off on her sisters, killing her without a second thought. She promised to avoid her sisters, to stay away and hidden until she had gotten the beast under control – or understood it more fully.

Until then, she had a body on her servos. She didn't think leaving it would be such a good idea. And with all the energon and fluids on the ground, anyone who came past would know the deed was done. She just didn't want to leave a signature on the body. Spark signatures were distinct between mechs and she didn't want any residue discovered on the body or even the body identified. Someone would want revenge. Or perhaps not, because he was a Decepticon. But if they were smart, they'd try to take out the threat before it become a threat, and she did not want a swarm of Seekers strafing the forests in hopes of killing her off.

But she didn't want to take him back to the ship either, and she couldn't leave him to scout around the area for new spots. That would give someone opportunity to find him. She instead started to collect most of the pieces which looked like she had ripped off, trying deperately not to purge her tanks for fear it would only make matters worse and leave an energy signature the hunters could track. Then she put them in the massive hole in his body and picked the mech to carry. Energon which still had drained from his frame spilled over her praxian-style chest, coating her grill in disgusting fluids. She tried not to give in to the reflex to wipe it off, knowing it would only make her want to purge even more. Her tank was tied in knots, between the fear and the overwhelming conflicting desires and bodily urges to purge. She managed to keep herself together. It was amazing what a mech could do when their life was at stake.

 _I hope Rhyme never finds out_ , she thought, thankful for the distracting thought though she wasn't sure it would be enough to keep her distracted for long. She tried looking passed the body thrown over her shoulder, her focus on what lay ahead beyond the line of trees towards the mountain. It wasn't the mountain with the tunnel, leading into the base, but another mountain which was adjacent to it.

 _What would she say_? she wondered, her tank twisting up into new knots. She would have glanced over her shoulder back at her mountain home, but the gray and light-gray body on her shoulder blocked her view. She forced herself to look ahead, trying to ignore the sensations in her tanks.

If she was lucky, her sister would merely say that it was an accident. Maybe she'd even say something about giving him a trial, which Rhythm would have readily agreed to. She would have preferred standing against him in trial instead of standing over him when he was dead, his mouth agape and smoke billowing from his internals, most of which he no longer had. He deserved some sort of hearing, and she'd probably get convicted for attempted murder. But it hadn't turned out that way. He was dead.

 _Would Rhyme turn me in?_ she wondered. She didn't think her sister would turn on her if she told her, but she think even less of Rhyme if she kept this secret. Better that Rhyme never knew, and would never have to make the decision to turn her sister in. Rhyme wouldn't have to make the call and she wouldn't have to think of her little sister as a murderer.

She would keep this a secret from everyone. Her sisters, her friends, so none of them would have to make the call. He was a Decepticon anyway. Who cared about Decepticons?

 _Thundercracker and Dreadwing were Decepticons too. Megatron and even Starscream had a change of heart once and while._ She shuddered to think if she had accidentally murdered one of them; she wouldn't be able to live with herself.

_Let's face it, you've become a monster._

She halted at that thought, wondering from what dark hole in her mind it had come from. _I saved my sister's life. I died bravely. No hero could have asked for anything else._

_But you're no hero, are you? What kind of hero kills a mech?_

Her tanks twisted uncomfortably and she stumbled in the woods, relief flooding through her as she saw the wall of gray rock. Her optics were already scoring the mountain's face for a place to stash the body.

_What kind of hero saves only those she cares about? Name one time you've ever tried to save a stranger._

She came to a dead halt. Where those thoughts even her own? _I've been on the internet a long time. You can't go anywhere anymore without running into someone who is depressed and thinking of suicide. I help where I can and try to stop people from killing themselves._ Admittedly, it would have been better if she was there, speaking to them face to face. She wished she could be there, but most of the ones she talked to either never disclosed location or were out of her country. She knew that. _Who are you?_ she wondered, but there was no response.

Her drive to be the hero and protector had started out when she was small, but at that time it had simply been some image she wanted for herself and everyone to see her as. It turned her into a bully, until the day came when she realized that she could in fact _be_ a hero. She could try and save people. A stubbornness had gripped her and she had made great endeavors to learn about people's psychology, but quickly learned that psychology books made no sense to a new comer and that society was forcing her to actually pay attention in school. She hated school and avoided doing the homework, casting her intelligence in a bad light. In private, she decided to conduct her own experiments, and to see what made someone do one thing rather than the other. She read a lot, observed a lot, and preferred being in the corner as she watched mankind. It had filled up most of her life, made her smarter, and she eventually started turning towards an academic pursuit and went to college. Everyone who called her stupid was ignored because they didn't know the experiments she did in her private time, watching reactions and testing them, even going so far as to appear as emotionless or as warm as possible just to get different reactions. She was smart and had become a great actor, but it could never compare to Rhyme. Rhyme was smarter and much more beautiful.

She shook that trail of thought away. Her desire to push everything to the extreme, to go the whole distance or to not go any distance at all, was a trait she enjoyed sharing with her sister. It's what kept them stuck together even when every other sister – or even twin – relationship around them was growing further and further apart. Rhythm respected Rhyme and, though Rhythm didn't want to admit it, she knew her sister respected her. She never understood why, but she also never wanted to let Rhyme know of anything that would destroy that respect.

A cliff wall stretched upward in front of her. Her doorwings flickered and rotated on her back, while her vocoder clicked. The rumbling sounds most marine mammals had easily translated into echolocation for Rhythm and her doorwings had taken a whole vorn to adjust to reading the soundwaves. Things she could see were easily picked up by her doorwings and it took a much easier time to discover the crack in the alcove, hiding a dark swath of tunnels behind it. She had discovered the place once before by accident and by a different route, since the tunnels connected to the darker tunnels that led to her home. It had taken the her calculating the angle of the sunlight and remembering the time of day to discover both entrance and exit, but she had managed. Now, it would come in handy.

She arranged the mech, grimacing at the energon that splashed onto the ground. Even though every sensible circuit in her cortex screamed that covering up this was useless, she did it anyway. She pushed the mech into the crack and – thanks to the alarming fact that his chest wasn't really there anymore – managed to squeeze him in. The echoing sound of his metal body hitting dirt below sounded alarming, and she caught a glimpse of his mangled remains at the floor of the tunnel, like a puppet with its strings cut. Shivering, she moved back, hoping beyond hope that they thought some animal did that to him rather than herself. She backed away, a strange relief washing over her. The deed was done, the evidence hidden away for someone to stumble across later.

It did little to quell her twisting tanks. She didn't know where to go or what to do anymore. It seemed like her life had ended. Could she return to face her sister now? What would she do otherwise?

 _I could always look into that message I found on the ship,_ she thought, conjuring up the datapacket from her memory. She frowned at the words and tried to divine meaning from them. It was emphatic, speaking about things she could only guess at. The Secret must be kept a secret or else the future of Cybertron and its restoration was lost, though it didn't talk about who she should keep it a secret _from_. Or even what that secret was.

_Maybe I would protect this secret with my life, if I knew what it was._

How was she supposed to take the word of someone she barely knew, anyway? It seemed stupid. What guarantee did she have that this Secret, whatever-it-was, was worth protecting if she didn't even know what it was. She dismissed the message, silently vowing to keep it a secret anyway, just because she didn't think anyone would listen. But that left her with little else to do. She could return to the base, check up on her sisters and get a very well-deserved rest. She rubbed her servos, glancing backwards worriedly.

At the edge of her hearing, she swear she could hear the sound of a heart-monitor. She only realized it now because it sounded distinctly like it was slowing down.

_Beep… Beep… Beep…_

But it was just as she registered it that it suddenly disappeared, leaving the forest even quieter than she ever remembered a forest being. She decided that she definitely needed a good night's rest and headed off toward her mountain.

* * *

The black walls of the base were a welcome relief from the strange alien green of the forest. If she paused to think about it, she would have said it was odd that a neutral color offended her optics so. It wasn't like the soft light of the yellow sun. It was an odd color, and she remembered it being so much less of an optic-sore when she was human.

But that relief disappeared quickly. The white noise which she had associated as the ship had ceased. Everything was so much quieter without the sound at the edge of her hearing. A deathly stillness seemed to have lain over the entire ship, and she couldn't help but wonder if it had something to do with the dead Decepticon. Did the ship have a sentience? Would it take kindly to her killing what might very well have been a member of his crew? She didn't know, and that had her worried.

There was an echo of pedesteps behind her. It was just off enough that she could hear, but whenever she turned around she didn't see anyone. Was the mech invisible? She almost called it her imagination, but when she stopped in front of the observation deck's door, the sound of pedesteps had continued a few beats longer than it should. Her spark caught up in her windpipe and she rushed inside the room, closing the door behind her.

Her servos shook as she backed away from the door and she sat down in her seat, telling herself that it was just her imagination. Just like the strange sound at the edge of her hearing had been. It was gone. This was sure to follow.

After she had calmed herself back down, she turned to the computers and turned them on. The sound of them booting up sounded oddly loud and unnatural in the deathly silence. The blue screen shown brightly up into her face, displaying a strange request for a diary entry.

She wasn't one to do diary entries, and it made little sense to start right now.

_Diary Entry 1…_

_Please enter entry…_

She tried to looking into other programs, but the diary entry seemed to follow her wherever she went. It had a mind of its own, and it wasn't willing to let her go. She wouldn't have been bothered if not for the strange noises she had kept hearing. Now her optics were messing her as well. Wherever the courser went, a small wind of the diary entry followed her. Whatever it was running the program wouldn't let her go.

Annoyed and frustrated and willing to try something new just to get it to stop, she wrote a brief summary of what had happened. The dead mech's body location was carefully left out of it, and all the other details were left out too, including her hearing problems. When she had finished, she didn't know what else to do or say, so she pressed the equivalent of the enter key.

The screen went black, and she jumped.

A mech was staring at her in the reflection of blue-black glass, rearing over behind a shocked mech that could only be herself. He was huge, towering over her, his blue visor shining and face twisted in a frown. She whipped around, but saw no one. When she looked back at the reflection, he was gone.


	4. Syndrome

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: Rape, bondage, detailed interfacing and a stockholm syndrome. It is kind of disgusting.

Undeterred by the strange and creepy supernatural-esque atmosphere that had suddenly overtaken her home, she pushed herself to her feet and headed back towards the not-quite-a-medbay, to both check up on her sisters and adjust to the strange silence which permeated everything. She was tense and on edge with the unfamiliar sinister underwater base, checking each corridor for anyone or anything who might have snuck aboard the ship.

 _Let's face it, Rhythm, you're just paranoid_ , she chided, wincing as she thought for a moment what it would be like if she was exponentially more paranoid than she currently was. _Goshdangit, I hope I don't turn into another Red Alert._

But she couldn't let it go. Something unnatural had snuck aboard the ship - she was positive about it, though common sense said that it might have been a simple glitch in her programming. Since her sisters were still in stasis, she had to assume that only a glitch in her own programming had awakened her. She wished she knew what had happened to her earlier, how she had become a transformer, then she could have something to work off of. Who was her creator? Was he a terrible programmer? Or was it something else that had messed up whatever system he had going?

And if he had turned five little girls into giant alien robots, could he have done the same to others?

Thinking had the adverse affect of calming her down, and her regular breathing exercises added onto the calm. Her blades were both out, ready to be used, but she knew she didn't have the heart to go through with the kill - though she doubted she had little choice in that matter anyway.

Was this the very same that had converted her and put her into stasis? Or was it a stranger trying to skirt around her in order to get to some information on board? She didn't remember there being anything of particular value in the system, but she could have just been skimming over it or her inability to do an in depth interface prevented her from seeing what was so important about the place.

The fact that he was avoiding her could mean he was trying not to get killed, which insinuated that he knew about her killing Reverb. Either that or he was trying to use some perverse alien scare tactic on her, which would have worked if she wasn't part human and hadn't already taught herself to become emotionally dead to even more scarier situation. Watching thousands of horror video games was a good conditioning tool, along with an active imagination, though the latter could be detrimental at times. Like now.

Was this some alien's version of a scare tactic? She had to admit that it was working, though minutely. She didn't believe in ghosts, though if such creatures did exist than they reasonably couldn't hurt her. They could attempt to scare her to death, but they were otherwise harmless. Mecha were physical creatures she could kill, even though she doubted she could go through with killing them. It was more irritating that he would even try to use scare tactics on her.

"Why don't you show yourself?" she hissed lowly, unwilling to raise her voice. It wasn't her not wanting to alert the mech to her presense that made her voice so low, but the eerie and unnatural silence which had descended over the ship. It was like standing in the middle of a forest but the forest being dead silent - no sounds of the wind moving the leaves or critters pushing their way through the undergrowth. She walked softly, moving slowly and carefully around every corner, while stress tied her tanks in knots. But she was determined to get to her sisters and didn't stop for more than a few seconds, afraid that if she stopped too long she'd become rooted to the spot.

A flickering image at the edge of her vision caught her full and undevoted attention. The strange sound at the edge of her hearing had returned, like an anvil dropping into the middle of a desert for no reason. It was startling, and made her tense up even more. The image wasn't familiar at all, but the vague shape of a black mech had arrested her attention. Black doorwings swept backwards from broad shoulders, and a blood red Autobot insignia adorned his chest and a sharp bloodred chevron decorated his helm. He looked very much like a Praxian, just like she did. Perhaps an attempt to appear familiar?

 _Great, first a wanna-be Decepticon and now an Autobot with a Praxian complex_.

"Who are you?" she said, her voice louder now that the white noise had returned. "State your name and function!" _Though I'm guess you are probably special ops, aren't you?_ she thought silently. It made sense, since he had managed to get on board, but then again what kind of special ops would announce his presence with a burst of barely audible beeping?

The blank expression he gave her was more unnerving than the silence. It was like staring into fiery molten gold optics that had no soul behind them. He gestured silently away and the movement made her flinch, it was so stiff and lifeless, then he walked off into the direction he had pointed, as if expecting her to follow.

With nothing better to do, she did, after a long thoughtful pause with the full expectation of him glancing back to make sure she was following. The fact that he didn't, but stopped anyway unnerved her, but she chalked that up to his doorwings, which though as stiff and lifeless as the rest of him, twitched minutely whenever she stopped moving.

There were alarm bells going off in her mind, but she shushed them by tightening her digits on her dirk and dagger, reminding herself that she was not defenseless. He led her to a room she hadn't been able to explore before, but she knew it was surrounded on all sides by hallway and one room, which was the not-quite-a-medbay her sisters were comatose in. She didn't like them being so close to her sisters and yet so far away, but she was curious about what this mech was doing here, who he was, and why he was so stiff.

The room they entered was extravagant and obnoxiously over the top, though Rhythm admitted to herself that she liked it. Black walls were decorated with neon colored spots and circles, which creeped up from the floor and down from the ceiling even though both the floor and ceiling were pure black. It was a beautiful and interesting in an alien sort of way, though admittedly garish.

"What's this?" she asked, not expecting an answer from the quite black mech and was surprised when he spoke.

"Your room."

A bed with thin neon colored curtains made purely out of a fine metal thread was set to the left of her, disguising the massive queen bed raised high off the bed in royal style. It looked too human-esque for it to have been designed by anything other.

"I admit the style is mine," she said slowly, looking over the wall's neon bubble collection. They weren't saturated, with shadings to look like actual bubbles, though some looked like solid colored balls. "But this looks nothing like my old room." She had never put so much effort into anything like this in her entire life, beyond exercising herself to become her sister's sacrificial lamb. Perhaps this was God's, or Primus', way of telling her she needed to get a life. Or a new hobby.

"Really?" he half-asked, looking her over with a thoughtful yet blank expression. She shivered.

"You have to excuse my rudeness," she said, without any apology in her voice, "but I must say no to these accommodations. I have adequate quarters elsewhere."

"This is just for tonight," he said.

"What? Why?" she said, alarm bells reawakening. Her lips curled in disgust. "Do you expect me to just crawl up beside you," she sneered, glaring at him, "like some lost pup?"

"I do not expect anything," he said, matter-of-factly. "I am merely setting up arrangements for tonight."

She glared at him. "And what exactly do you expect to happen tonight?"

"Merely for me to fix your programming."

She gave him a helm tilt in confusion and distrust. "Who said my programming was flawed?" Standing right next to him, the beeping sound only grew louder, but more garbled, like he was muffling the sound.

He stared at her, looking her up and down like she was some piece of candy, except his expression was still very blank. "You are a lot more mature than the others."

That out of the blue statement made her think twice about what she had thought about the mech. "What are you?" Her doorwings twitched as she scanned him and he came back reading as sparkless. Her tanks went cold before her thought whirled to come up with a reasonable explanation for it. "You're a holomech."

"You're scanners are working," he said, slightly... amused? She couldn't tell. He was as easy to read as a brick wall.

"How do you plan to fix my programming?" she asked, disconcerted.

"Through interface, naturally," he said smoothly, but it still sent chills up her spine. "We will establish a personal link over our hard-drives."

"How will you manage this when you are just a holomech?" she asked.

He stopped and stared at her, as if that was the strangest question she could ask. "The science behind it is not something you can yet understand," he said dodgingly.

She squinted her optics at him. "You were the one who called me mature."

He returned the scrutiny, his words carefully placed. "Physically, yes."

Insulted, she huffed and turned away from him, walking up to the empty bed-berth combo and noticing the fabric that didn't seem appropriate on Cybertronian sleeping equipment. "Is this a standard Cybertronian berth?" she asked.

"A large Cybertronian berth," he responded.

She picked up the corner of a sheet, liked the feel of it, and bundled up the corner so that it pressed up against her side. "And the fabrics?"

"Standard native decor," he said with slight distaste and befuddlement.

She looked up at him, digesting that. So he knew about the humans on the surface. She digested that, wondering where the nearest human settlement was and how he managed to get there. He looked up, expression unreadable, and she felt he was looking straight into her thoughts already.

"What purpose does the berth serve?" she said, suddenly paranoid and heeding the advice of her instincts.

"Somewhere your body can rest while I investigate into your programming and fix the problem," he said.

"Nothing else?" she probbed.

"Not unless you want it."

She snorted, glancing down at the berth. He appeared on the other side, a silent shadow, parting the curtains with a finger. He looked like a pervert and she shuddered. Of course, this was an A.I. programming manifested as a holomech and his strangeness should be forgivable.

"How does the interface work?" she asked, hoping to distract it.

"I will physically link up with a port in your wrist and tap into your mind to look at your programming and repair it."

"Sounds like it will hurt," she said, disapprovingly. "What exactly in my programming do you think needs fixing?"

"Your aggression, of course," he said. "You do not want an incident like earlier today to happen again, do you?"

She shook her helm, but frowned. "How do I know your motives are pure?"

"You don't."

She scolded, and he just watched her blankly, sitting down on the edge of the berth. She looked over the berth and had an inkling that he was wanting her to crawl in the berth for reasons other than a quick processor scan. Couldn't a processor scan require a small berth or even a desk? She had barely met this mech and she was not liking the implications that she was someone or something to be bedded at a whim. This was all sounding like some poorly written porn episode.

 _If he tries anything, I'll just stab him._ She didn't know how effective her weapons were against him, but it was reassuring to think she had something she could do in case of emergencies. She subspaced her weapons and turned her attention back to the mech.

"Only if I want it," she said to herself. "And what is the name of the mech who seems to want to share a berth with me?"

He looked offended, or as much as he could with those dull optics. "I am here to service you however you want me to," he said. "I am designated your Mentor and Guardian."

"Teachers don't crawl into bed with their students and neither do medics. Neither guardians or teachers have medical training."

His face twitched at this. "True, but my services are more broad than a normal mech's services. I do not have a spark, so you have no worry of bonding with me."

"I have more concerns about whether or not I want to have sex with someone I barely know and who claims to be something that doesn't do the things he insinuates he's suppose to do." She looked him over. "Are you a medic and teacher all rolled into one?"

"You are under the mistaken impression that my programming works under your species moral code," he said flatly.

She didn't know if it was the reference to the fact that she wasn't Cybertronian or the fact that she was woefully out of her league when it came to knowing things about Cybertronian culture that had her suddenly bristling.

"Have you been in my head before?" she asked.

"Have we mentally linked in this way before, do you mean?" he asked. "No."

 _Oh, how he dodged that question_ , she mused to herself. "Have we interfaced before?"

He stared at her silently, evaluating her posture before deigning an answer. "Yes."

Her spark lurched. "Mentally or physically?"

"Mentally, of course."

"How can I ensure we don't interface when we... mind meld?"

"We will not if you do not want it."

He said it like it was as easy as breathing and the problem was that it wasn't. Her curiosity was perked up at the idea of finally interfacing but she didn't like the idea of interfacing with him. She wanted a mech who actually felt something to give her some, not something which a blank expression on him at every single second he looked over her to pound her. She shuddered at his expression as he looked at her body, like it was candy. She did not like this.

"I can leave whenever I want," she half-said, half-asked, hoping to sound confident.

"Of course, you can," he said.

It probably wasn't meant to sound reassuring but it did, however strange that sounded.

"Very well," she said, holding out her hand. "Wrist port, right?"

"I would suggest you lay down," he said blandly.

"I would suggest you don't say that again," she responded, surprised at the coldness in her tone. "I am not crawling in the berth with you."

He stared back. "Very well." He wrapped his servo around the middle of her arm, wrist to wrist, before connecting. She flinched at the strange sensation in her wrist, before something _massive_ hit her consciousness. It slammed into the side of her like the wake of a yacht into a fishing boat. She wasn't altogether powerless, since it all happening within her mind, and a few dozen screens appeared on her HUB to remind of her of the thousands of the programs waiting for her to activate them to protect herself from the presence invading her mind. The Mentor was most definitely not a living being; it had no soul or life, but animatronically moved, prompted by its programming to think or do. It was the most base of intelligences, swarming thoughts emerging out of the still pool of its mind.

 _Maturing even as we interact,_ it mused to itself, and she got the faint impression she wasn't supposed to overhear its thoughts. The moment it realized she had, it pushed her away, causing a spike of pain to penetrate her mind before subsiding. In that one mental push, she had lost all connection with the rest of her body and was vaguely aware of it slumping against the bed. It was this strange sensation that might have felt so familiar but wasn't that caused her to become aware of something else.

Everything felt _off_. It was like everything was _supposed_ to feel differently and she knew it, though she couldn't recall exactly how it had felt before. The Mentor mentally took note of this anomaly and realized the problem, retreating from her mind.

It was then she became intensely aware of something _else_. Something that felt off on an entirely different level.

Something was _touching_ her. It felt strange and unwelcome, like every other touch she had ever felt, except on a more extreme level. The sensations felt wrong, more intimate, but at the same time even less intimate.

Beyond her sister hugging her or her mother kissing her goodnight, and having two of those kind of friends who were _too_ touchy feelly and didn't stop hugging her, no one had ever really hugged her. Not since middle school. But this was more than just a simple hug and she stiffed as digits plunged, unwelcome and unwarranted, into the crevices of her back armor. It wasn't even pleasant, and those strange new sensations spiraling up her spine were extremely out of place.

"What are you doing?" she demanded, before her voice was muffled by soft but firm lips. Demanding almost.

"Admit it, you want this," he said, _it_ said. "You've wanted this ever since you came to college. Ever since you started looking up gratuitous fanfiction of Jazz and Prowl slash."

It was a mild slap to the face, and she realized her had done more than look through her programming. It was a violation of her mental comfort zone, and was gradually transforming into a violation of her physical personal boundaries.

"You are not Prowl," she told him, then added as an after thought. "Or Jazz." She wasn't entirely sure she wanted this holomech knowing about her particular interest in Prowl. "What makes you think I want to do this with _you_?"

He didn't even think it over, and he sounded like he was quoting something. "I am masculine in appearance. I have all the parts that a male does, but without any drawbacks. I can give you pleasure and not give you child."

"I am a Cybertronian," she said, unamused. "We don't have children."

He tilted his helm. "That isn't true and you know it." It leaned forward for another kiss but she jerked back, otherwise unable to get out of its grip, and that made her angry. It continued, oblivious to her displeasure. "Cybertronians are fully capable of reproducing. It is interesting, however, that you think we produce using spark merging."

"I have multiple theories. None of which I intend to disprove or prove at the moment."

"So, in the near future, curious one?" It made the term sound endearing and it made her shiver, though she couldn't tell if it was from disgust or pleasure.

"No," she told it firmly, pushing and wiggling in an attempt to get out of its grip and away from it. "This is not my consent."

It seemed to think it over, watching her creepily as she focused on getting out of its grip. It let her go and she sprawled, sliding off the bed-berth. She was on her pedes in a second, moving away from the mech on the berth.

"I can give you an education. Satisfy your curiosity." When she tensed up more, it decided to point out. "I am programmed not to hurt you."

She looked the mech over, noticing how it was currently naked. "Hmm, remain a virgin or lose my virginity." She sneered in disgust. "No thanks. I don't know you that well and I don't like you right now." She paused. "And why would a hologram want to interface with me anyway?"

"You wanted it."

"Past tense, before we even came to this room, and _to someone else entirely_ ," she pointed out.

Its frame flickered, transforming into a familiar black and white mech with red chevron and doorwings.

"That doesn't make you him," she snarled.

"Why do you have so much interest in this mech?" it asked. "He's a fictional character, a fantasy, and yet you harp over him like a real person."

She gestured around herself. "Uh, hello? This doesn't seem to disprove that theory."

"But when you were human, you believed he was real even though you knew he was not."

"Such an argument could be made against God," she pointed out, annoyed. "You can't expect the human race to follow basic logic. It's not as simple as that."

"No, of course not," it said softly, finally looking away from her towards where she guessed was the door. "Is that why you like him? Because he's logical?"

She shifted. "I like him because he's determined. Determined to end the war. He loves the Autobots, even though he won't admit it, and he is antisocial so most people don't know the mech underneath."

"The Prowl from the comics didn't care."

"No, he didn't," she admitted, disliking the fact that he was reminding her of the flaws of her favorite character written from someone who didn't understand the first thing about logic. Most people thought logical meant uncaring or emotionless, but logic was simply another name for reason, albeit corrupted over the years to become an absolute. In a being with emotions, reason was always held above logic, because logic couldn't straight up explain emotions without a few reasonable assumptions thrown into the mix.

Perhaps Prowl was a character who embraced the absolute, or was simply reasonable to tenth degree. She honestly didn't know that, but it really didn't matter. Prowl was determined, successful, and the complete opposite of what she was. She was a straight B student struggling to get back in her mother's good graces while stuck in college, about to lose that loan that was going to cost her both an income and her parent's support. She was the most illogical person she knew, even though she reasonable when dealing with everyone else around her. It was herself who always got the short end of the stick, from the world and herself.

She suddenly realized that she was still thinking of her human life as being one week ago, or just two months ago, like 166 years hadn't passed since she was a Cybertronian. It was bizarre, but she chalked it up to being a Cybertronian and thus have a different perspective on life.

"Why do you care?" she asked. "Why do you want to interface with me?"

"I want to help you," it said. It sounded rehearsed, and she found herself growing increasingly frustrated with the creepiness of this thing. Even though it didn't have emotions, she'd thought a program like this would be a little more logical and forthcoming of answers.

 _Looks like I'm going to have to figure out its motives myself_ , she thought, mentally switching lanes and analyzing the mech before her.

It gave a start, startled, as if it was still connected to her mind in someway. Perhaps the way she stood and the look she was suddenly giving it had it going on the defensive. She didn't know, but an answer suddenly rolled out of its lips.

"You attacked a mech who planned to rape you," it said, watching her almost warily now. "You need to get used to interfacing so that you can use this to your advantage and..." it paused, searching, "...not have to kill him next time."

The argument was so full of holes it was like swiss cheese, but the conclusion had her reconsidering it. She did want to be prepared to find a way out that didn't involve killing a mech, though perhaps running away next time would suffice.

"There are other solutions to this problem," she said, icily. "Raping me isn't one of them."

It glared at her. "Very well," it said, annoyed. "Perhaps it will be more of an incentive to use your abilities to escape."

Before she could ask what it meant by that, it lunged at her. She yelped and ducked away, surprise fueling whatever served as adrenaline and making her move almost too quickly for her processor to catch up on. It whipped around, reaching for her and she ducked away, reveling in the fact that she inches out of its grasp - until something tightened around her throat and pulled her backwards. She collapsed, gasping, shocked, looking up at the semi-giant mech with a metal linked chain in its grasp.

"Now, let's see you escape this," it said, sending chills up her backstrut.

* * *

"You're so beautiful, y'know."

A slow whine escaped her engine as she hadn't not yet figured out how to stifle it. Her body was hot to the touch, both from her growing rage and embarrassment at both her nakedness and thick spike that made her tanks twist in revulsion. The squelch sound every time it pumped her too full valve made her embarrassment grow and every sound that escaped her beyond the carefully stifled moan only further embarrassed her. She couldn't work her vocoder around the gag to tell him to stop, because she had already wasted that opportunity insulting the slag out of the holomech, who had grown tired of her insults and just stuffed a gag down her throat - though the first time, it hadn't been a gag. She was still trying to get the taste out of her mouth, which was strange because it tasted almost exactly like water, with none of the intoxicating tastes that would normally drive her hormones crazy. That missing level of taste and hormones only brought up just how surreal her situation was to her. She almost didn't believe it was happening, except every slow, full pump reminded her in the most uncomfortable way that it was.

Its voice was surprisingly soothing and gently, accentuated by its cold touch and her very vulnerable position, tied up on the berth before him. An unwanted kiss stroked her smooth cheek, and many other areas of her body she hadn't realized existed ached as another overload tightened her grip on its spike. It felt so real, and yet so surreal, that she almost wanted to give in to her exhaustion and sleep but at the same time still wanted to get out of her position and escape. Her processor was a bit more fuzzy than she was used to, and she had started to slip on her mental grip after the first overload.

It seemed so hopeless. She couldn't escape the thick chains that had her arms and legs twisted underneath her and behind her back, her knees splayed to allow it full leverage over her valve, which it worked to stretch in the most uncomfortable and violating way possible. She jerked away from its lips, her engine letting a low whine.

"Feisty, too," it praised, clearly enjoying its position over her as its fingers gripped her hips to work them against its thrusts. They were even, steady and never once hiccuping or changing pace, making the whole thing even more uncomfortable.

She couldn't figure out how to escape. She had tried to get out of the chains, only to discover that they wound around her arms and elbows and her pedes, leaving with little or no leverage to work with. It hurt to move, because it would misalign the spike inside of her and the holomech would hit a node or wall a little too hard, on purpose or on accident, and she found it much more tolerating to stay perfectly still. She had overloaded and it hadn't slowed down its pace, just shifted to grip her slightly differently. Perhaps it had sensed that she was close to giving up.

She had hated being in this position, with so much out of her control. She didn't want to think of what would happen afterwards, when it all ended, and she was left to her thoughts. What would her twin think of her? Would she think less of her for giving up so quickly after it had begun? She was pretty sure she had only been underneath the holomech for about five breems.

 _Five minutes is all it takes for them to take away your virginity_ , her mother's words echoed in memory. She hadn't realized or valued her virginity so much until after it was gone, the mech had barely given her time to prepare before piercing her, ripping her seal out of its groove. It had pulled out long enough to untangle the seal from the tip of its spike before plunging back in and beginning the thrusts. It hadn't stopped or changed after that and, after her first overload, she found herself slowly getting used to the rhythm. She was almost docile, the fight having been taken out of her trapped limbs and every part of her body that flexed beneath each thrust reminded her of the unwanted attention being paid between her legs.

She had started to drift mentally just to get away from it, trying to find refuge and not showing the holomech an iota of emotion, which cracked every time it did decide to do something new, such as speak to her in this strange possessive way or kiss her on some part of her neck or helm, preferably near her sensitive audios. The fact that she found it so unpleasant caused the moments to pass by like hours. She barely registered when it finally pulled out, earning only a disinterested muffled moan from her shivering, hot to the touch, frame. It glanced over her body like one might look at a stuffed tiger crouching semi-realistically in a museum, before closing the mostly see-through curtains and walking away. The sudden change in behavior was so jarring that she found herself suddenly very much awake.

_Now's my chance to escape._

Her valve ached unpleasantly as she shifted her legs, but the motion proved to be useless, as it was before. She wasn't going anywhere, and that served to calm her down from the excitement of being so close to freedom. She turned her attention internally again, but this time not bothering to drown herself in exhaustion or dreamland, scanning her systems for a weapon or unique function that would enable her to escape. Nothing stood out.

Her body had started to cool off, and she checked her systems again, just to pass the time until the holomech inevitably came back. Her valve relaxed, and she became increasingly aware of an unpleasant numbness that had started to wear off. Her valve ached in places she hadn't known existed and her legs didn't want to move too much. She could handle the pain when lying still, but her legs twinged painfully whenever she shifted them and the chains, adding on to the discomfort of her bonds.

A dark servo reached out and removed her gag, and she gasped for air, turning away from the mocking red Autobot insignia.

"Why are you doing this to me?"

It didn't hesitate. "Physical examination. Mental examination. It serves dual functions while also introducing a third function. You're valve isn't significantly stretched, but it will stretch move over time. You'll grow used to it."

"You ever heard of Stockholm Syndrome?" she growled, not entirely sure that the alien understood human terms.

"I have heard of it. It does serve its usefulness."

If she hadn't been exhausted, she would have felt a chill go up her stomach. At the moment, though, she was finding its servos gently caressing her body more important to pay attention to. When its servos neared her valve, it roughly thrusted three digits inside, stretching the valve and causing it to automatically turn wet in preparation. She gave a soft unexpected moan with the first thrust, but with each rough thrust following, her body was the only thing that reacted. Her back curved so that her lower torso was straight, while its digits transformed into a full servo, fisting her valve open wider. She couldn't spread her legs further apart to halt the jerking pain that came with each fist thrust. Another servo braced her back, carrying most of the weight as the holomech hammered. Her valve and its servo were wet when it pulled itself out, forcing two digits down her throat to taste her own fluids and clean it. She didn't suck on it, but the taste and a few drops burned hotly in her mouth. It served as a temporary gag.

"You aren't supposed to enjoy this," it told her in its soothing masculine voice which served as something she could latch onto for comfort. "Interesting that you do, but Stockholm Syndrome will come in handy later."

It made sure the transfluid got all over the interior of her mouth, its other servo coming up to pry her jaws apart for its wet fist to come through. She couldn't help but swallow out of fear, the taste burning down her throat.

"You were doing so well before today," it said, catching her optics even though her mouth was occupied. She almost preferred its first version of a gag better, except for the transfluid it had aimed down her throat. "Lesson One is almost complete. You need to escape this scenario and it will be over. You'll be free to escape or return for a much more _pleasing_ reward."

It pulled its servo away only to return it to fisting her. She tried to bit back a few moans but its tongue and lips stopped those for her. It released her enough for her to take in a very human breath. It shifted until it was straddling her waist, its plump spike much bigger than she remembered it being and it caused her to wince and moan as she realized where it was most likely going next.

"Don't fight this," it purred. "You know better. It will only make things much worse."

She shivered as it slowly shifted so that it was straddling her grill, the display of spike poised directly over helm. She could see each blue energon line beneath the seam, the only armor that covered its otherwise purely energon spike. She had a brief moment to wonder if all spikes looked like that before its tip nosed towards her slightly open mouth and slipped beneath her two sets of denta, sliding over her glossa and tasting both good and terrible as the tip hit the back of her throat and turned downwards. It shifted and moved more like a tentacle, expanding around its center in order to fill her mouth, before releasing a stream of transfluid down her throat. It burned sweetly down, like honey, settling in her tanks, registering on her systems as pure energon.

"You were running low," it explained, not at all apologetic or self-conscious about the position it was in. It probably thought that it was simply accomplishing its goal without further corrupting its other goals. Its hips rolled, her mouth shut around the uncomfortable lump trying to crawl down her throat, and more transfluid, or energon, entered her tanks that way. She couldn't help but swallow, her throat tightening momentarily around the spike tip.

"Good girl," it purred, soothing voice a reward in of itself. She hated it, she hated the mech, and hated the fact that its attention on her and only her was making her more satisfied than she cared to admit _._ She blamed her ego and her nonexistent pride.

There was a horrible moment where she actually considered a life where she was stuck here, being a pleasure bot for a holomech who had no real idea of what satisfaction was. It was too horrible to contemplate for long and she quickly turned her attention to trying to figure out a way to get free. The mech lifted a leg and, for a wonderful moment, she thought it would go away and leave her alone, but it instead lay down beside her, its holographic body emitting a strange warmth that was mocking and unnatural. It kissed her on the chevron and she felt spikes of pleasure ripple over her helm as it gently nipped her there.

How kind of him.

She shuddered as each touch led to more firm, more intimate and more passionate touches. Her mind was scrambling to get elsewhere, but this time she had focus to work with. Her systems began to appear on her screen, one by one.

_Energon Tanks_

_Armor Plating: Torso_

_Armor Plating: Abdomen_

_Armor Plating: Right Forearm_

_Armor Plating: Left Forearm_

She skimmed through most of them, including one labeled 'Processing Component 1'.

_Missile Launchers: Currently Unable to Active; Suggest Change Alt. Modes_

_SZ Phase Shifters: Inactive._

_Defense Programming: On Standby._

_Portable Shield: Functioning; On Standby._

"You're ready."

It was as if the mech had read her thoughts, saw the one thing that could allow her to escape, and had decided now was the time to distract her. It pressed a servo to her valve, but didn't fist her again, instead, shifting its body and hips so that it was leaning over her again, ready to enter her and pound.

"Relax," it said, voice soothing and gentle. Kind.

_NO!_

In a moment which she could perhaps never repeat again, her mind hooked around that distant device – that Phase Shifter – inside of her, and she found herself clutching it with her mind and plunging it into activation. It threw up questions at her, asking her if she only wanted part of herself to phase shift – but she quickly pushed passed all that to activate the whole thing.

And suddenly, she couldn't feel his touch anymore. She couldn't even feel the cables around her or the collar choking her as she suddenly hit floor. She lay flat out, utterly free and feeling extremely hot, lying where all the cold air had settled against the cold floor. Gasping, she tried to pull herself forward only to discover that the berth that had been above her was gone and that the mech who was nothing more than a program was standing beside her, looking extremely displeased with this turn of events.

"Not bad," it said, its optics reminding her all to much of her nakedness as it searched her from top to bottom. "I suppose you could do with a small break."

That last comment made her relieved, until it stepped forward and reclamped the collar around her neck. Her digits wrapped around it in shock.

"Later," it promised, sweetly, a digit to its lips. "We have only just begun having fun."

She ripped it away this time, her phase shifter causing her neck to become intangible, and she sent it skittering across the floor, much to the hologram's… displeasure? His expression was suddenly blank.

Surprisingly, her helm did not crash to the floor the moment the neck became intangible. Science could be worked out later though.

"No," she said, firmly and quietly. Her vocodor working through a flexing throat, relieved that its member wasn't inside of her anymore. Her legs shook with effort, but she ignored it.

"What?" it said, looking suddenly angry. The holomech was huge, she remembered, and from her spot crouching on the floor, she saw someone much bigger and more dangerous than the mech who had gently raped her moments before.

And, suddenly, she didn't care. "No," she said, more firmly and loudly. "I'm not your plaything."

"That wasn't what you were saying a few breems ago."

The embarrassment curdled into something bitter. The holomch was worse than slime and she found herself giving it a smile. "That's because you are _my_ plaything. I made you think I wanted it."

It mouth opened its mouth in a retort, but no sound came out. It shut its holographic lips and scolded, before smiling, teeth gritting together.

"You're _my_ plaything, runt," he growled, leaping forward. "I'm not done with you yet."

She yelped and leaped aside, activating her Phase Shifter without any real thought and watched with some small sense of satisfaction and no small amount of surprise as its servos went through her. It stumbled, catching himself before turning on her again. She had already made a break for the door – or at least, where the door should have been. It was still there only covered up by a hologram, or so she kept telling herself.

So, she ran through the wall… and kept right on running. She didn't stop because she couldn't process the images dancing across her processor, and what meant she couldn't go any further. Suddenly, the walls of black and grey turned in oceanic blacks and blue-greys, and she realized belatedly that she had run right past the ship's hull and out into open water. She floundered, her phase shifter panicked and shut off, and she found herself quickly catching up to gravity as she fell. Florescent glowing moss broke her fall and she made a very strange whoosh noise as she hit, sending shredded moss everywhere. She rolled back up into a fighter's stance, staring back at the ship in incredulous.

It looked strange from this angle, she noted with bemusement, numbed with shock. She saw the Observation Deck, bulging at the front and looking out across deep water, with its aft stuck beneath a massive cliff. It made her wonder, for a brief, ludicrous moment, how it end up stuck like that.

She shook herself, remembering her lack of armor and not wanting to be caught dead, naked, out in open water. She swam (read: walked) the whole distance towards the Deck and used her phase shifter to leap inside, taking a little bit of sea water with her. She hit the metal hard and rolled, springing to her pedes and letting out a startled bleep.

The holomech stood with its arms folded over its chest, its expression unreadable, though she sensed displeasure from it. She sneered in disgust.

"Congratulations, sister," he said evenly. "You passed Lesson One." He moved to walk out the door, but halted. "When you next come down to get your armor, we can begin Lesson Two."

She remained stock still, almost not believing that her tormentor, captor and rapist was walking away. She shuddered in relief, but an impulsive thought to thank the mech made her scowl. Terror gripped her tanks.


	5. The Killjoy

The cold depths of the sea surrounded her, but a different cold sent a shiver down her spinal strut. She shuddered, chilled straight to the core. She felt as if she would shake apart she was shivering so much, and hugging herself wasn't solving the problem.

First, she had accidentally killed someone. Sure, she had never really known him, and it wasn't considered murder, but thinking about him made her want to purge.

She shivered at the cold air as she emerged from the water. Her mind was a whirlwind of twisting emotions as she struggled over two problems at once. The recent episode with The Mentor and her growing concern that she might have fallen as a victim to Stockholm Syndrome, and her dilemma in concern with that dead Decepticon.

She had never thought of herself as particularly weak, but after the last few days she couldn't help but think she _was_ weak. To give into her most base emotions and kill a mech for almost no reason at all, without a trial or even a second thought, was beyond barbaric. She had reached the lowest of the low with one half-thought-out move. And now she was starting to give excuses to someone even more messed up than her and even call them... _nice_.

It was abhorrent. Obscene. Rhythm couldn't wrap her mind around it. She wanted to give up and just lay down right there on the sand, with the sunlight baking her backside and the waves rolling over her legs. She had never felt so weak and vulnerable before, and she was embarrassed at herself.

Perhaps she was being a little too prideful. After all, she was only human. A normal human being that now inhabited a giant robot body, though she was unsure how that had come to be. Even then, she had standards, morals. When did _they_ just suddenly disappear?

 _You've gotta pull yourself together,_ she said to herself, pushing the thought aside. She could solve that problem later.

Later was better than right now. She had to keep moving.

_But how can I face anyone I know, having done what I've done?_

She felt sick to her tanks, and her limbs shook with emotional exhaustion. A spike of anger at herself, hatred at what she had done and what she had become, so weak and helpless. Tears burned at the edge of her optics, never to come out. She didn't want to move, couldn't move, as if someone had put bricks on her body and it was only now, in the brimming surge of anger, that she recognized how heavy they were.

She had a burning desire to keep moving. It was part of the reason she was called Rhythm. Like the waves of the ocean, she had never stopped, never slowed down. No, she had done _everything else_. She had avoided work, avoided learning, avoiding getting better at what she was bad at. That wasn't the _Rhythm_ way. That was a childish way. She had thought she was better than this.

 _When am I going to grow up?_ she admonished herself. She was Rhythm, always moving and never stopping, always surpassing every obstacle in her way. Rhythm could not exist where laziness ruled.

 _How long have I been ignoring the part of me that wants to keep growing?_ she wondered. _How long have I let laziness rule over me? Prevent me from being me?_

She had to take back control of her life. Like the day she had died. Because her life wasn't over. Not yet.

_Glowing angry yellow eyes, beams of light, glared at her from the dark wet atmosphere._

Funny how it was so much like her situation now with The Mentor and his golden yellow optics. She shuddered, clawing her way up the shore, feeling exhausted but not at all at the same time. It was confusing, and she wanted to rest, but she knew that would not make her move any faster or refresh her strength.

She needed a new name, a new identity, something that she actually _was_.

_But what?_

What could her name be?

Spite had always underlined everything. Out of spite, she had refused to bend to the society's rules. She was a rebel even before she had become a teenager. She had refused to even try at school, and the world had screwed her over. It was a dumb move and she knew it, but that didn't stop her from attempting it. It had been an experiment. Her life was one big experiment. Or so she had told herself.

Perhaps to protect herself from ever having to truly try anything. It prevented her from becoming something great, but it also prevented her from failing. Even in failure, if she kept telling herself it was just an experiment, she didn't feel like she had failed.

It didn't matter anymore. It never mattered. It was like she had woken up from a dream.

A dream which had centered entirely around her sister.

She didn't know where to go from here. Maybe she had never known.

She shivered as she lay down on the ocean shore, her tanks twisting up in fear. Fear of the unknown. How brave are those people who simply go about their lives, excited about a future they couldn't control?

She almost cracked a smile at that last statement, but it turned into a quirked lip corner that could have been a frown or a smirk. How ridiculous that seemed. It made her wonder just how scared she really was of messing up her life.

In a strange twisted way, everything was exactly how it should be and exactly how it was. There were ups and downs, people in charge and people who lost control. It's only those who could get up afterwards that could really be considered strong.

She did it long ago, once, but she was a kid then. Could she get back up now? She was far from being the easily adaptable child she had once been. She couldn't roll with the punches anymore, could she?

What was the worst that could happen? Death? Abject humiliation?

She snorted a laugh. She had already experience both. It made her old worries seem so small now.

She could get back to her pedes today, because she wasn't yet dead. She was alive.

The sun was starting to set. The forest had turned dark.

She didn't think about waiting for nightfall, she simply sat back and did. Her mind had ground to a halt.

When darkness finally fell over everything, she found herself moving out of the water and toward the treeline.

She didn't feel anything, no drive or passion over some new awe inspiring purpose. She felt tired and bone-weary, as if she had been fighting a battle her whole life and only now realized that she couldn't win. A part of her had died and given up, and she felt a little like she just really wanted to die in some dark corner of the universe and be forgotten, if not for that smaller, stronger part of her that wanted to live.

She was still in shock, struggling to put two ideas together into a single sentence, while a third part of her mocked from a distance, telling her she was weak for being unable to string a whole sentence together. Her mind was so fragmented.

She mentally shook herself. A steely calm settled over her as she rose onto her pedes. Her mind raced as memories flickered across her vision, unleashing a torrent of warm and cold through her entire body. Confidence, strength, power, echoed the breath of every word going through her mind.

_Enough! You're stronger than this. You're no quitter._

She mentally shook herself. _You might just be a girl, but you're a girl with a desire to save lives and an ability to get it done and get it done right. And you do it without thinking of yourself. If this was going to stop you, you'd already be dead by now._

Her optics flickered and narrowed into slits. She didn't flinched at the next words going through her mind. Her blade was in her hand before she could stop it, and she absently admired the blue glow as her thoughts turned elsewhere.

Did this mean she had finally cracked? Now that she was talking to herself, even if it was only in her head?

_You are never satisfied with your own performance. You get stronger, better, and faster. And everyone who has ever lived and harmed another should fear you. Because you never stop. And even it isn't true for yesterday, you can make it true for tomorrow. You are in control of your choices. That's what has always made you the strongest._

Her mind seems to be clearing. She hadn't realized until it cleared that it had been foggy. She lowered her hunting knife and looked out over the forest. She recalled the mech from before, with his savage predatory gaze and his now greying corpse.

_It's not my fault that he was a monster, but...  
_

_Could I really be sure he was a monster, though?_

Remembering him reminded her of other things. There was a cave not that far from here, with a body that she could salvage armor from. His body.

She was too exhausted mentally to freak out over the fact that she was partially naked. Her doorwings informed her no one was around so decided that it wasn't worth thinking about it. Besides, she was now using her phase shifter and could pass through the organic matter like it wasn't there, so it wasn't like she was wasting time out in the open, giving strangers ample opportunity to oogle the parts of her protoform showing.

She didn't feel right without some power, control, over the situation, even if that control didn't actually exist. It was the knowledge that made her feel secure, like she had a grasp on the future.

She could walk through the trees, like some dark phantom of the forest. Thinking about what other people saw as she phased through the trees got her to smile.

She was dark and dangerous, a threat to all kinds. If she was going to protect them, she first had to protect them from herself. Naturally, they should come to fear her. If they feared or didn't like me, they wouldn't spend too much time around me. _  
_

But that road lead to loneliness. She wasn't sure she could be alone anymore.

_I am a lot like a phantom. I died in order to gain this new body and now I can walk through walls like a phantom. But 'Phantom' isn't a good designation, is it?_

The forest blurred by as dark straight shapes in the dusk, their darker canopies blocking out what little light could be seen from high in the sky. She made no noise on the grassy turf, and felt the smallest amount of pleasure from slinking through the shadows like a silent predator. She had power now.

 _I don't_ need _any friends._

That last thought stopped her, and she found herself staring around herself in silence. The world had turned an ashy color with her phase shifter powered on, as if all the color was sucked out of the world. Shadows deepened and darkened, transforming from playful shades, from sinister almost black silhouettes to dead and harmless dark grey in less than a second. She felt untouchable, unreachable, standing and basking in a world comprised of nothing but white and shadows.

It was her world, her domain, and she felt something swell inside her chest. It wasn't pride, but a sense of feeling honored to have this world all to herself. It brought comfort to her and she found herself relaxing as she continued her walk.

The alcove opened up before her, a dark crack cutting through the grey cliff-face. She stared up at the grey slanted walls as she moved closer, marveling at their colorlessness and their sheer size. She held out a hand through the crack, pushing her shoulder through the crack before realizing that her armor could phase through the rock. Snorting, she quirked a lip corner.

_Just like the trees._

She slipped inside and adjusted her optics to the dim light. A familiar grey body lay awkwardly to her left, exactly where she had left him. His face lay exposed, his last moments of confusion etched on his face. Her servos stretched out to roll him over, but she merely phased through his physical form. She blinked at it in confusion for a few seconds before remembering that her phase shifter was still online. Sighing, she turned off her phase shifter, refreshing her optics as the world was restored to its colorful glory. The purple insignia returns to its normal stale, paint color, but the rest remained the same dull grey.

She felt shaken to the core as she handled his body, a slight tremble going throughout all her limbs. Her lips curled into a disgusted grimace, but she shook herself and returned to her chore rolling the mech over so that she could see the insignia on his chest, Decepticon-shaped and shoddily done.

_Probably done to himself. A willing participant in the Decepticon fight for dominance._

A sigh escaped her and she relaxed against the walls, wrapping her arms around her thighs and pulling her legs close to her chest. Her glowering red optics landed on the greyed out husk at her pedes. Even in death, he had the shape of most mechs, the broad shoulders, thick arms and legs, and squarish face of intimidation incarnate.

 _What had he been doing out in the forest, anyway? Besides wearing that fake Decepticon insignia and going after the first carrier in sight_ , she added grimly.

She looked over the dead mech and finally tore her gaze away, finding some much more interesting bump in the cave wall. Her processor went elsewhere, back to her human life. She had never truly started to think about her situation before, how much she knew about the transformer world and how she should be comparing it to the world around her. Then again, the world around her was much different from any transformer world she could remember from her time as a human. Nothing around her screamed she was in a cartoon show or some contrived comic book plot that was meant to keep it going for another few volumes.

Everything _looked_ normal. Real, even. How could something so real be nothing more than a dream? She couldn't be dreaming now, and she couldn't have been dreaming then, but how else does anyone explain waking up as a transformer after dying? Even if Primus had appeared right then and there, she probably couldn't bring herself to believe him if he told her himself that she was a transformer and that this was all real.

Nothing was making any sense.

And the only mechs who had answers were either dead or had it out for her. Both had attempted to rape her, one succeeded and the other lost his life. This could mean a very bad future was waiting for her on the planet. Hostiles could be around any corner.

Her optics drifted towards the dead body, silently processing his still form.

He knew what was waiting for her on this planet, though she doubted she could get any information from him. He was dead and not liable to chat her up anytime soon.

She pressed her hands to her face. She regretted killing him, but she had no more control over his death than the holomech who had raped her. Everything was out of her hands, out of her control, and she felt lost and confused. She couldn't just pick up the phone and call her mother and ask her how to get out of this situation now. Everything spiraled out of her control the moment she woke up, if anything had been in her control to begin with. And for once, it wasn't the next school project that had her flustered.

An exasperated vent escaped her, and she rubbed her servo across her face until it rested beneath an optic, allowing her to stare at the body. The silence stretched on and she shifted uncomfortably, tensing at the unfamiliar sound of metal scrapping against rock. Her gaze slowly absorbed the whole cave, the small crack in the far wall. She looked back down at the Decepticon, or whatever he was. Her digits pulled at metal around his neck, not yet brave enough to start invading beneath his armor plating without permission… oh, what the heck. The mech was dead anyway.

Silently promising that she would bury his body later or at least seal it in a steel coffin, she slipped her digits beneath his neck line and tugged at armor, pushing aside cables with all the gentleness of a surgeon. She had shaken off her trepidation like she had once shaken off her armor; there were more important things she needed to concern herself over than the dignity of a dead Decepticon... such as who on the planet might kill her in retribution. If not for The Mentor's mind rape, she probably would have never thought to check his wrist for ports. None of the usual suspects had spots, and she found herself uncomfortable invading his mind through his wrist port. Given them the satisfaction of her touch, dead or alive? She would rather fall on her own hunting knife than succumb to such lowly acts. She was no pleasure bot.

She practically ripped the mech's wrist armor aside, and metal snapping loudly causing her to pause. Her optics flickered around self-consciously, registering that she was in fact still alone. The broken armor piece shook in her tight grip, brittle and dull in post mortem.

Her gaze slid to the mech's face, as if she sensed he was still alive and watching her, but his empty blue optics only caused her to become even more uncomfortable. It looked like the optics belonging to a regular Autobot. Her gaze turned downwards, and she fingered the metal in her grasp as her other servo turned the arm over. A dataport lay open before her and she found the sight of its dark hole extremely uncomfortable. To peer into the mind of a mech who was already dead; how low could she go?

She shook herself. She needed to know, because she needed to be able to prepare and survive it. Nothing else mattered.

A similar dataport was on her wrist and she immediately went to work to activating it, and pressing the rim against the dead mech's own port. She shuddered as her own cables slid into the wrist, cold and unmoving.

Her mind was suddenly invaded with a cold, dead presence, like something which had once been alive now stiff and unmoving in death had perched on the edge of her mind like some horrible gargoyle. She shuddered, but shook her thoughts and feelings on the matter aside, pressing her consciousness into the coldness and clawing through the stone-like mind to it's memory core.

She immediately noticed the one thing that remained alive inside the mech; his personality component flickered while it rested on stand-by, waiting for a medic that would never come. She shuddered, disgusted with herself. He was alive, somehow, buried beneath layers of inactive mech, and her intrusion was more than likely unwelcome. She was taking advantage of his state, just as the holomech had taken advantage of their size difference.

If she had known that, in modern Cybertronian sciences, he was already doomed she would not have been so inclined to wallow in the possibility that he could be saved. She had murdered him in cold blood, ended his life for no other reason than she had a hunch he would kill her.

But Rhythm had distanced herself from coming to any conclusions, her mind focused purely on facts, memories and anything else that would be of value to her inquiry. She would soon realize that she had found much more than she bargained for.

* * *

His name was Reverb. Beyond his simple and rather pathetic life as a neutral pleasure bot, he was an Decepticon activist. That was all she really needed to know about him, because that entire sentence had made her mind go from worrying over his personal space to being disgusted at his entire person. He was the lowliest of the low who enjoyed his own lifestyle and the femme's he laid because of it, happy to cause misery to those, like her, who would look down upon him and his profession. To put it in another way, the Autobots hated him, and he hated them in return. This mixed up relationship, however, did not stop females from joining him in the berth. The war was so bad that even those with the strongest and firmest of principles could cave to the promise of some small pleasure in this hour of darkness. Reverb quickly learned that the high and mighty Autobots were are spineless as most of the neutrals, unable to stand firm in their beliefs and easily caving beneath his digits tips and his hungry spike. It took so much self-control not take advantage of them when they flocked to his door; the only thing stopping him was the ever present threat of death hanging over his helm if the "Decepticon sympathizer" should ever step too far out of line.

The only reason Reverb hadn't completely jumped the fence and joined the Decepticons was for two reasons: one, he knew from rumors that the Decepticons only accepted soldiers and scientists into their fold and he would have to actually do something the moment he joined; and two, the love of his life and the energon in his fuel pump was not anywhere near the Decepticon front lines, but playing patty-cake with the Autobot's own third-in-command. In short, his life as a Neutral and Autobot pleasure bot continued on ad infinitum simply because he had one very good reason for not joining either side of the war.

She was beautiful, fragile as any other femme frame could be but hiding underneath a firecracker and fierce personality. Her entire life revolved around the Autobot cause and the Autobot's Third-in-Command, the notorious Jazz and head of Autobot special ops. Naturally, Reverb couldn't exactly kill his competition and hope for the best; Jazz was impossible to kill with Reverb's level of skill and Vibe would quickly discover him, as most Special Ops Agents tend to do.

Or he assumed she was special ops. Autobot Agents didn't exactly run around with badges claiming they were a part of that division. Besides the obvious ones, most of the Autobot agents were like smoke on the wind; one second you thought they were there being all Agenty and the next they were someone else and you had no idea if they stood right next to you. They were hard to pin down, tricky, and bad for someone as reputedly "sympathetic" as Reverb.

He had tried and failed (read: done nothing) to change his luck in life and so he was stuck on the sidelines watching his future bonded play to the fancy of a mech who didn't deserve her.

He would have given up his plans altogether had it not been for the arrival of Darklight.

The gold-opticed, black mech moved with the fluidity and grace that Reverb could only dream of, the same fluidity and grace that Jazz and Vibe had in spades. Reverb noticed right off that Darklight was more than just another neutral seeking shelter from Decepticon attacks, just as, unfortunately for Reverb, Allout did. The neutral leader stupidly decided to bond with the charismatic and powerful shortly after he arrived and joined her neutral crew. Reverb tried to keep his frustration from showing, furious that his one shot at defeating Jazz would slip away so easily.

Except it hadn't.

It happened one day when no one was looking, on that day that Darklight would leave, dropping off the map like a ghost, before appearing one orn during one of Reverb's session hours. Reverb's business had plummeted and his entertainment had disappeared down the drain along with his patience. The Autobot's rumors of his sympathetic relationship with Decepticons had caused more than half the neutrals to ostricise him, leaving him to seek out entertainment instead of the otherway around. With the war growing exponentially, more and more were trying to get into the Autobot's favor and avoiding his doorstep. Used to be that they would be begging to take his spike right between their thighs, and he would be more than happy to tease the whole night away, one customer at a time. At this rate, he was planning to just give up and go join the cons and end it right here.

But Darklight surprised him. The charismatic mech had given him that smile that was more of smirk, had teased him with promises of more than just a very good night, with touches that set his whole body aflame like it never had before, but also a very good future, one he had been hoping for ever since he landed in the middle of this Autobot-protected Neutral camp. Darklight might not have been Vibe, but Reverb was more than willing to accept the mech into his berth for another go round. It was fun and interesting to finally have a berth partner who wasn't abandoning him just to keep his reputation and who wasn't a female with a valve. That last bit had made the experience all the more interesting. Reverb had never taken a male with a pleasure valve before.

Darklight had his secrets, and he wasn't as social as Jazz. He kept to himself most of the time, disappearing for hours on end to Primus-knows-where. Every single time, he showed up at Reverb's doorstep, teasing him into hours of more pleasure, sometimes getting Reverb to overload and other times purposefully leaving him unsatisfied so Reverb had to beg for more. Those nights were the most interesting, because Darklight always wiggled out some promise to Reverb that he was more than happy to follow through with – just for another night of perfectly satisfying rewards.

Reverb didn't care that Darklight never publically visited him; the nights were well worth anything. But he found himself repurposing his life during the day, taking his old flames and lovers in the Neutral camp for a spin as he convinced them to help web a few new rumors into the old grapevine. Needed some Autobot's reputation tarnished? Insinuate they'd once had a night with the infamous Reverb. Those few rumors that were true called everyone to believe that those that actually _weren't_ were true, too. The deception was made doubly sweeter with every night Darklight visited him.

It paid to have a lover who was also rumored to be bonded to the Neutral leader. Allout never once questioned Darklight, so devoted to this mech and in love with his gorgeous gold optics and perhaps even with his ways in the berth (Reverb was already worshiping the mech's spike, and he could only imagine what a female with a real valve could feel). While Allout went to meetings with the Autobots, Darklight was dragged along like a loyal dog to witness the proceedings. Every meeting never turned out the way Darklight wanted it – Reverb knew because the mech would confide in him and pound some of that frustration into Reverb's pleasure valve.

It was when Darklight started trash talking the Autobots, Jazz specifically, when Reverb found himself with what he had never had from the moment he arrived at Iacon – a friend. The rewards of pleasure developed into something more, not like the hard and serious relationship Reverb thought that Allout had with Darklight, but a relationship that was more than Reverb was used to with his customers. Dare he say lover? He wouldn't be the first male to fall for another male, but it was certainly something new. Certainly something most Cybertronians would consider evolutionarily entirely unbeneficial. He had to agree with that last point, but it was his life, slaggit, and he _loved_ those nights.

But he never forgot Vibe. He had something to preoccupy his thoughts of Vibe, but the moment Darklight began discussing Jazz, his love for Vibe would surely come up in a future conversation. It certainly did. And that's where things started to go uphill and downhill at the same time.

Reverb wasn't entirely sure how it had begun or ended, depending on what he was thinking about, but all he knew was that he would be crushed beneath Allout's heel if she ever found out what had happened after Darklight and Reverb had stopped meeting just for interfacial pleasantries. Regardless, their _friendship_ started to get a bit more public.

When Reverb first heard the news that Vibe was leaving the planet, leaving him behind with her more-than-a-friend, Reverb discovered that he wasn't as crushed as he would have expected.

"A real pity, that," he was saying to his companion. For once in a long while, they were back in his quarters, far away from prying audios inside the only good quarters any neutral could get a hold of nowadays. The five room flat had enough space for all of Reverb's more rambunctious and adventurous activities plus enough room for him to have one affair going on in the berthroom and another in his more private living spaces farther away from the door. Darklight lay underneath him, his spike port barely touched as Reverb leaned over him, staring into his flat abdomen and rewinding his thoughts.

"It disgusts me," he continued, "how she continues to pretend to be in love with that flake, after all of the rumors surrounding him about his love interests." Forget the fact that Reverb himself had an even worse reputation.

Darklight rolled his optics, their yellow hues glinting in the dark starry night. Reverb wasn't looking up at him, but he could see in his mind's eye the mech, bathed from what little light always streamed in from the windows "And to think," he said, pointedly, with a charming purr to his voice, "I'm going to get stuck on a ship with her."

"You?" he echoed, wrapping his mind around that thought and feeling a sudden panic flare in his spark. "You're leaving on the Neutral ship?"

"With Allout," he said slowly, frowning. "All bonded Neutrals are going."

Reverb felt somewhat betrayed. "You didn't think of telling me sooner?"

Darklight shifted slightly, uncomfortably. "I didn't know how to break it to you," he said, his unease genuine. If there was anything Reverb had learned, it was how to tell someone was telling the truth or lying through his denta. "I was waiting for the right opportunity."

The cameo grey mech sat up, forgetting about his lover's port bared beneath him. Those gorgeous yellow optics, rarer than any other optic color in the world and understood to be the prettiest optics anyone could ever see, had him enraptured. "That meeting was yesterorn," he said slowly. "When are you leaving?"

"Next vorn," he responded, grimacing and rubbing his helm sheepishly. "If there are no delays."

Reverb nodded as his mind whirled. That was practically a month in Cybertronian time, and that wasn't all that time. "Can you get me on that ship?"

Darklight stiffled a laugh. "What?" He looked at Reverb with a smirk on his lips. "You going to miss me that much?" It was a tease, but Reverb wasn't in the mood for playfulness. He could do that to Darklight later, when he wasn't feeling as strangely _terrified_ as he was.

"Answer the question," he half-snapped, checks turning slightly blue.

The black mech frowned at his lover, golden optics narrowing in sexy slits. "Of course," he said, "Allout rolls over on any issue once I have her between my legs." A smug smirk played on his lips. "She'll let you come."

Reverb let out a vent he hadn't known he was holding and pressed his face into the black mech's abdomen, relieved. "My valve has been waiting for you get out of that meeting," he rumbled, "you know that."

Darklight only gave a choked rumbling sound, struggling to hold back a purr. Reverb smiled, satisfied that he had Darklight wrapped around his digit, and Allout around Darklight's.

* * *

Darklight's princess ruled the ship with an iron fist and all five tons of her shuttle mass. The ship might have been seven times her size, but nothing could countain her almost tank twisting enthusiasm and optimism towards the voyage out into space. No one liked to leave the planet behind, but when it came to Allout, she put a whole new level on hating the Autobot and Decepticon war. Because if it ever came down to leaving the war and the planet along with it, or Darklight and the mostly female neutral crew, she would chose the former. Reverb almost admired her for it, if not for the simple fact that he knew a secret most on the crew did not; Allout had given up Cybertron to whoever won the war. That was the thing; leaving the planet forfieted the spoils to the victor. Everyone one the boat knew it, but they didn't care. They were too pacifistic to defend their homeworld.

That was the tank wrenching conclusion Reverb came to the moment he found himself ostricised once again by the crew and alone to contemplate thoughts a mech like him shouldn't ever contemplate. The longer he remained on board the ship, the more he hated every other mech and femme on it. Scrap that fact that he and Darklight were the only males onboard.

No wonder Allout didn't want him on board. Only the females were leaving on this voyage to the unknown. Allout's reasoning for actually leaving Reverb onboard was because he had might be valuable source of entertainment, and he actually would become Allout's version of entertainment the moment Allout's new pet spy caught any rumors about his illict activities.

They hadn't yet taken off yet and Reverb was already regretting his decision. His room was all packed and ready to go, bolted down where it was needed in preparation for the initial g-force of launch. If the Autobots could teleport them outside of Cybertron's atmosphere, this journey would be a whole lot safer for all involved. But, because they didn't have any teleportation technology, they were forced to wait for the opportune moment to escape. That opportunity was long in waiting.

Reverb blamed Prowl for that. The Autobot's Second-In-Command was a genius tactician (and perhaps one of the reasons Reverb never actually joined the Decepticons) and every tactical plan he had absolute control in always ended in a overwhelming victory. Megatron's own tacticial genius could not compare, and it was only through sneaky mindreading mechs like Soundwave that the Decepticons had any chance of actually defeating the Autobots. They were at a stalemate, and Reverb was of the opinion that Prowl – the logic bound tactician – should join his Logic Brother on the Decepticon side and end the war once and for all. But for reasons that always baffled the pleasure mech, Prowl ignored his own logic and never joined the obviously winning team.

To make matters all the worse, when they finally did take off, he wasn't awake to see it happen. He never saw Cybertron receeding in the distance, never got his chance to really say good-bye, and that made him all the more grouchy. Unfortunately, once they actually got into space, his options had suddenly become very limited. Extremely limited. Limited so much that any step out of "regular crew activities" was likely to end with him being served up for Allout's soup. To put it succinctly, he was very much grouchy.

The long trip across the stars was extremely boring. He never saw Darklight once, and he knew Allout was the cause. Somehow, someway, the giant shuttle she-mech had discovered Darklight's illict affairs. Reverb could only guess as to why he wasn't a pool of molten metal right now.

He had no companions on the ship, not even one-night stands, and he had nothing to do but skulk around the ship and get pointed at and leered at by everyone else. He knew Allout was to blame, and he stewed in angry silence as he gazed out over the peaceable field of black space and twinkling white stars through the massive hallway length window plastered onto the side of the ship. He could hear pedesteps approaching and decided to ignore them, hoping that if ignored the jeers that were sure to come, they would leave him alone.

"Strange to find you all the way out here."

The voice seemed to have its own power as it gripped his spark casing and he turned to look at the mech before him, never before having been happy to see one of his ex-lovers in all of his life. A relieved smile twisted his welcoming grin into a mishmash of lip component movements that should honestly not be possible on a mech's face. It did not help that he had suddenly lost his ability to speak.

"Darklight!"

The black mech shook his helm almost sadly, an amused quirk to his lips. "Not the same being stuck on a ship full of females," he admitted slowly. "Finally nice to have some guy company, you know."

Reverb's expression fell and the mottled grey mech slumped. "Oh. You just came for a chat."

That statement earned a laugh, booming and filled with an emotion Reverb couldn't quite catch. His lips quirked up in amusement, though, as the laugh turned genuine.

"Oh, yeah, it must be extremely difficult for you without the freedom to play with frames," he finally said, sounding as sympathetic as a chuckling rubber wall.

Reverb was not amused. "Can't wait for this damnable voyage to end," he complained.

In the momentary silence, Darklight let out a sigh. "Yeah, it'll be great to get back onto solid ground again." He stretched his arms, interlocking his digits and stretching his arms over his helm while Reverb watched from the corner of his optic. A flash of gold light told him that he'd been caught, but Darklight didn't tease. "You really haven't gotten much into your berth, have you?"

"How can you tell?" Reverb asked, tiredly. "It's so lonely in my room all by myself all the time. No one to talk to, no one who doesn't throw a datapad at your head or call you a slut, anyway."

" _Your_ head, you mean," Darklight said, giving a dark purr.

The mottled grey mech's lip quirked at that, remembering many times he had the mech beside him purring darkly as he hammered his spike hard into Reverb's pleasure valve. Oh, those were the good times. Reverb sighed. "I just hope we land on somewhere made of metal. I'd hate to discover I have no place but this damnable ship to play on."

Darklight tilted his helm curiously. "Oh, haven't you heard?"

Reverb frowned, suddenly angrily. So many mecha onboard had left him out of the loop that it left him feeling extremely ostricised, even when the jeering and leers didn't send him packing. "What?"

"Allout's planning to land on a planet not that far from here," said the black mech, gold optics gleaming in that sexy way Reverb always liked. It put him in a much better mood. Well, comparably speaking.

He propped his helm up with his servos. "Oh?" he said, only mildly curious.

Darklight raised an optic ridge at him. "It's energy rich and very mountainous. You'll like it there."

Reverb tilted his helm, glancing around himself. "Any place is better than here," he mumbled, his optics drawn back to outside. The black expanse of space stretched out forever, spattered with far away celestial objects.

Movement in the reflection caught his optic and he saw black arms aimed to land on him, clapping his shoulders soundly. Darklight moved closer, dipping his head close enough for a whispered conversation but not close enough to be considered overly invasive. "We'll have a night there, just the two of us, and I'll make this trip a thing of the past. Agreed?"

Reverb smiled, a slow twisted smile that reflected his burning blue lust filled optics. If Darklight wanted a night alone with him, Reverb was more than ready to make it so that the other mech couldn't walk anymore. "Agreed." He turned his own blue optics towards the other's gold. "Y'know. I think I'm gonna love it there."

Darklight smiled, as sexy and dark as the day Reverb had first met the charismatic mech. "I thought you might."

* * *

Energy rich was perhaps the only redeemable quality that the whole organic filled planet had. While everyone else piled off the ship, more than happy to stretch their legs and explore the unfamiliar territory, Reverb found himself much more hesitant in approaching and examining the new terrain. Organic growths grew everywhere, twisting and forking in unfamiliar shapes, creating a very fascinating atmosphere for a scientist, but not for Reverb, who saw every prickly object as an uncomfortable and unimportant stage place for a good interface.

But the new surroundings and the last dregs of cabin fever had them all explore more territory than they'd normally dared, and while the only Autobots onboard – Vibe, Strongarm and some other females – tried to keep them from going too far and falling off the edge of the planet, or worse, fall into Decepticon hands (Reverb didn't mind at all seeing some of them be tortured to death by Decepticon hands). The energy rich atmosphere seemed to have captivated everyone's attention, promising something that the neutral's hadn't had in a long while – an abundant flow of energon.

Reverb managed to sneak away from them, simply because the moment he was off ship most everyone had stopped paying any attention to him. Everyone else had probably already assumed that Reverb wouldn't attempt to interface anyone up unless he was on a smooth berth (and, in fact, some of them actually did believe that Reverb was chained to his berth). But anyone who really knew Reverb knew he was more explorative than what other's might give him credit for. He explored on and off the berth, in anyway and anyhow he could.

Trails of green twisted off into the distance, cut a part by trails of brown or grey, spotted with blues and yellows, actually made the planet look very beautiful and what was initially a world of limited options openned up into a world of possibilities. Boulders twice his size stretched high over the ground and some marked small areas where the trees didn't grow, while yet other more mountainous regions had entire regions where organic life didn't grow and beautiful views for him to look out over as he waited for his next lover to wake up for another session. He could not stop himself from thinking that his lover would be Darklight. Every possible spot he came across was a spot for him and Darklight, and no one else.

He finally backtracked over the trails, using his memory to identify areas of land which had traversed over and quickly finding himself back at the ship. A few stragglers out front greeted him with the usual "Oh, so you didn't get lost, fragger?" and "Bummer he's not half as good looking as Darklight." He ignored them and kept going, satisfied in the knowledge that Darklight was his and his alone, and not even Allout could prevent them from having time together. How many of these femmes and mechs had felt the power of Darklight's spike in their valve? None of them, beyond Reverb and Allout herself.

Reverb sought out Darklight specifically, careful to keep out of Allout's sight the entire time. He found Darklight talking with Vibe about security, of all things. Reverb shrugged it off.

"You can't organize the neutrals like their Autobot soldiers," Darklight argued, his engine giving low snarls. "We don't know the first thing about defense. You should focus on keeping your own femmes on watch and not try to get us involved in your childish games of war."

"The Prime ordered us to protect all Cybertronians on this vessel and we are going to do it. And since it also involved some of your own self preservation, I'd think your neutrals would be willing to protect themselves against any Decepticon threats."

"Look around you, Mistress," he half-sneered, and Reverb couldn't help but feel some small amount of satisfaction from his best buddy standing up to the Third-In-Command's sex-doll. Darklight was coiling himself up for a strike. "There aren't any Decepticon's around here. So, take your high and mighty attitude and shove it elsewhere. We are done with the war and we aren't going to go along with your stupid ideas anymore. If Optimus wanted to protect us, he should have come down here himself."

Reverb backed up, not wanting to tarnish Darklight's spotlight while Vibe was present. It surprised him that he didn't see much in Vibe anymore, his attention having been diverted elsewhere for so long that it had started to matter less. When the red Autobot was gone, Reverb stepped out to wave at Darklight, catching the male's gold optic and causing the black mech to relax his shoulders. Reverb greeted him with a saucy smile. "So, I found the perfect spot for us."

Darklight blinked his optics once before he finally returned the grin, remembering what he had talked about with Reverb. "Perfect. I'll bring a few toys and some energon." He chuckled. "We won't need to conserve our energy now that we are on planet, right?"

"Right," Reverb agreed, with that strange feeling that Darklight had referenced something he didn't know about, but he dismissed it. "How should I service you, mate?"

Darklight's expression grew much more beautiful at that question and Reverb wanted to pat himself on the back for illicting such a response from the Neutral Leader's bonded. His gold optics had narrowed into sexy slights and his energon-blue tongue briefly exposed itself as he licked his lips. Reverb loved the fact he had this mech wrapped around his digits, and that made his grin widden.

"Anyway you'd like, handsome."

Reverb felt his spark leap in his chest at that nickname, but his expression remained fixed in a smile as some strange doubt warmed into his spark.

"Perfect," he rumbled. "We can leave now."

* * *

Tricking the others, especially the Autobots, into turning a blind optic towards the pair as they disappeared was the easy part, though Reverb's fuel-pump went a few hundred miles too fast. The sickeningly stupid Autobot sentry had accepted their combined desire to have some alone "male time" and allowed them to leave unmolested. Reverb knew that "unmolested" was not a term he would soon be applying to the sexily swaying hips in front of him. The black mech was going to have his spike hammered until he had cummed twice, or else Reverb had fainted from exhaustion.

Reverb took the lead shortly afterwards, guiding his lover to the perfect spot just above a small hill of land and towards the alcove, where a secret dark crack revealed a large cave. Enough light poored in so that they wouldn't be in complete darkness, but the shadowed recesses meant privacy from all optics and they would have however long they wanted to enjoy their time together. (Killjoy shuddered when she realized that she was sitting in the same cave they arrived in to satisfy themselves. She didn't get up out of fear for picking out the exact spot where they ejaculated on the walls, and she found herself immensely creeped out over the images trying to rearrange themselves into her mind.)

The floor felt warm beneath their bodies as they pressed close, Reverb's engine putting his name where his mouth was and messaging the mech's spike beneath him. Darklight had yet to pull himself back out and didn't really want to at that moment – Reverb's pleasure valve was tighter and hotter than a female's valve and he enjoyed the superiority of having his lover pressed facedown into the smooth cave floor. Reverb's eagerness and sexual frustration had built into a fantastic game of plug and play that Darklight couldn't help but moan and groan underneath, as he found himself pinned between needy pleasure bot and hard rocky ground. Joor stretched by in what seemed like minutes as Darklight overloaded himself into exhaustion and Reverb was forced to follow suit, much more satisfied than he had been in a long while.

"Well," said Reverb, when the throaty roar of his engine had become unbearable in the strange awkwardness which had settled over them. He planted his elbows on either side of Darklight's helm, frowning thoughtfully down at the mech.

"Well," Darklight responded, neutrally.

Reverb frowned. "Don't tell me you dragged me out here just for a good frag."

Darklight chuckled, his voice rich and smooth and all kinds of sexy as they bounced into Reverb's audios. "No, I just knew the idea of finding a new interface kink would appeal to you."

The mottled grey mech frowned. "Well, you got me here. Now what?"

"I was wondering if you'd be interested in a position here," Darklight began, slowly. "As an officer in an army."

Reverb blanched, shifting himself and rolling his hips. "I'm not interested in joining the Autobots."

Darklight grunted, his lip curling as he shifted beneath the dark grey mech. "I wasn't talking about them."

Reverb recalled the conversation Darklight had had with Vibe and realized how foolish he was, his face transforming into a scowl. "Oh?" asked Reverb. "Does Allout know about this?"

"No. Heh, you could write a book about all the things my bonded doesn't know."

"Not very loyal of you, is it?"

"Ha! My loyalty is to one mech and one cause. Nothing else."

"Oh? And what cause would that be?"

"The Decepticons."

Reverb actually sat up. "The Decepticons," he repeated, testing that word on his vocalizer. "Here?"

Darklight grinned. "Why else do you think I convinced Allout to come here?"

The dark grey mech frowned, confused, his mind trying to wallow through the thoughts in his helm. He had thought Darklight was bonded to Allout, wasn't he? That meant loyalty, but this was obviously not loyalty. Reverb was struggling to put two and two together and his overload previously wasn't helping matters. "She's your bonded. Don't you share things with each other all the time?"

"She's my bonded only because she's easily manipulated," growled Darklight, and Reverb could practically hear the silent 'like you' tacked on to the end there but he found that he didn't care. It helped that he was very comfy where he was, and he rolled his hips, smiling at the rewarding grunt he received from the other 'neutral'.

Reverb went serious. "And who would be here, on this backwater of a world?"

The black mech finally had enough of being dominated and decided to turn the tables, exposing his own spike and gripping Reverb's. The dark grey mech let him.

"Ever heard of the femme Airachnid?" he asked, after he had settled in.

Reverb had, and in his opinion he had heard many nice things about her, especially in the berth.

"She'd be very interested in you, y'know. The only mech in vorns who has any real experience with the opposite gender," Darklight continued, smiling as he whispered his sweet nothings into a fully open audio.

"Hmmhmm," Reverb managed, feeling the need to add to that. "And the same gender."

Darklight actually paused at that. "Right."

And from where he sat, bathing in the touches of his companion, he found that the idea of becoming a Decepticon appealed to him more and more. He hated Allout, for reason he wasn't so sure of himself, and he hated Jazz and Vibe by extention. Wouldn't it be fun to see them crushed under the heels of a hot Decepticon femme? Even as his thoughts shifted to demanded more erotic pleasures out of his less experiences companion, he found himself enjoying the idea of power that it gave him and the growing desire for that power over someone else.

"Airachnid," he repeated, imagination going wild as he thought of the many ways he could tie her to the berth, or get her between his legs. Darklight gabbed his attention once more as his electric blue tongue snaked out to touch the tip of his exposed spike. He found himself imagining Airachnid there, licking his spike, and he found himself liking to the idea – though not as much as he thought he might.

"That would be _nice_."

Those words earned him a rather hard nip to his spike tip and he moaned out in surprise at the pleasure rippling over his spike as Darklight took him and sucked, electricity flashing between his tongue and Reverb's spike. Reverb arched into the touch, letting out a moan of shock, and feeling the pressure inside his spike suddenly grow. Darklight pulled away, leaving Reverb wanting and unfulfilled. From the glitter in his gold optics, Reverb realized that Darklight knew it too. And a strange dark feeling wrapped around his spark, but he pushed it aside. Could the mech look any better than that?

"Perfect," he purred, his tongue flickering out teasingly and lapping up Reverb's length. "I'll arrange a meeting for you two, sometime soon." His optics darkened, and Reverb thought he'd never looked sexier. Darklight smiled. "I'm sure you'll be more than perfect."

The black mech took Reverb whole and Reverb let out a surprised shout, feeling the tension and pressure in his spike rising to unbearable heights as denta scrapped across his spike. Darklight pulled away before he could fully cum, teasing another series of gentle licks and nips out of his spike, and a few moans out of his mouth.

Reverb didn't think he was going to regret his decision.

* * *

Darklight had him hook, line, and sinker. Killjoy was disgusted, recognizing the taletall signs of someone who knew they were in control from the get go. Her thoughts instantly turned to one simple conclusion; Darklight was a Decepticon spy and had been from the moment he landed on the neutral camp, manipulating his way through the Neutral ranks.

But why? What reason would he have for getting buddy, buddy with a few hundred neutrals and one Decepticon sympathizer? Speaking of which, the more she knew about this mech, the less she found she cared about the fact that she had killed him. In the end, he deserved it. He was a selfish _pleasure_ bot, and not in it just to help others enjoy themselves.

_Karma is a bitch and her weapon was Killjoy._

Reverb had only come to the boulder the very next day, intending on joining with Darklight and becoming a Decepticon. He had painted the purple Decepticon insignia on his chest out of childish pride for his soon-to-be faction. When he met the small black and white she-mech at the boulder, he had at first thought Airachnid was testing him. He was dead wrong.

Killjoy stared at the corpse at her feet and shuddered as memories of her slaughter came back unbidden, but from two separate points of view. She recognized the coldness which had entered her stare, the terrible emotionlessness which had gripped her during that time in the body language in the mech she came to recognize as herself. He had no defenses, no way of reacting in time to save his life. He was dead. And she struggled to come to terms with the fact that she had mercilessly slaughtered a mech, who thought guilty had never gone to trial, had no way of raping her and had no intention of doing so without her permission.

That was the only really redeemable quality that Reverb had – if one considered that redeemable. He respected others enough not to rape them.

She had slaughtered him.

She shook herself, pulling her attention back to the present and the immediate future. There were two femmes of power here; Allout and Airachnid. She wasn't familiar with Allout, beyond her newfound memories. Allout was perhaps boisterous and stupid, but that was only observations Reverb had made and he was jaded and baised. Airachnid was the wild card, and beyond her own knowledge of alternate transformer universes and alternate Black Arachnias and 'nids, she knew nothing about what could very well be the 'real' Airachnid. One lead the Neutrals, one the Decepticons, with Autobots and traitors caught up in the middle.

Reverb had no real information for her to work on, no real idea of just exactly where Airachnid was and what she was doing. Only Darklight had that and she had just terminated the only being in the whole world who could have got her connected with the traitor. Then again, if Reverb hadn't died she wouldn't be aware of this traitor to begin with.

Ugh, life was complicated.

On the plus side, she now had a better idea on how to work her vehicle forms and to transcan properly. One never knows when that might come in handy.

When she finally stood up again, she had to sit back down again. Her valve pulsed painfully and she shuddered as her digits brushed the mesh surrounding the slit in her skin. A thought came to her and she reached out towards the mech, yanking off his crotch plating with a few swift jerks. He wouldn't be needing it, and if her hunch was right it was the perfect fit for her own armor problem. Her optics roamed over his dead form. While she was here, she might as well steal some of the other armor too. No one knew when Darklight or even Airachnid would be back around to search for him. And Darklight would know his location because this was the very spot they had-

She shut off that thought swiftly. No need for more nightmares, thank you very much. She did not want to think of what Reverb _felt_ while Darklight pounded the senses right out of his processor.

Her current ache and pain was nothing more than a reminder. A reminder of what shouldn't have happened and what would never happen again… if she had anything to say about it.


	6. Thinking

She wasn't much of a thinker. As a human, she had kept her thinking to a pure minimum, working only from instinct. Her only concern at the time had been morals; it had always been about her morals. Whether it was morally acceptable to really work hard for school, to work for a society that didn't even know who she was on the inside. That was the first thought that had started the seed of her hatred towards the world.

There is only so much someone can tell themselves before the world starts wearing her down. She believed that she would always help the weak and at one point in time that had been true. But the seed was sprouting the day she lost Baby, her best friend and favorite dog. No one had cared enough to step out of their perfect lives to check and make sure she was okay. Her mother was the only exception, but even then she had no idea what to do. The world had no idea _what_ to do, that it had _anything_ to do. It was full of a bunch of morons.

It was only the first step in a spiraling cascade of spite against the world. The only one who was ever forgiven was her sister. Her twin. Because out of all the people in the world, she had been the only one who knew what to do.

She admired that about her. Her twin was the only one who ever tried to look past the monster she was slowly transforming into. She didn't care that her sister was angry all the time. She didn't try to change her. She understood that she had been trying to figure it out. Her mother had tried too hard to change her. Windcatcher didn't understand that she wanted to figure it out on her own.

The world was full of a bunch of morons, and Killjoy had been the only one to see it. These imperfections, corrupting the innocent. Her twin. Every child.

She told herself that she didn't care what they thought of her anymore. It didn't matter.

She had taught herself to be curious, to never leave anything alone, to take responsibility for everything herself, because everyone else was a moron who would be too stupid to deal with it properly. These were the thoughts that had her wanting to rule the world, pushing to become the best and bending to society's whims until the day she could snap around their legs like a clam. She would help make the world a better place, with her sister in the lead.

She wasn't stupid or blind. She knew she had started taking her own stupid pills one day, while her sister had remained perfect. She was not fit to rule in the new world, and she was okay with that. Power didn't matter to her. Not physical power that she could hold. She just wanted a voice in matters, while her twin lead the way. She trusted her sister to tell her when to stop, when she was going too far or not going far enough.

But her sister wasn't here. She had to pick up the slack simply because her sister wasn't in the picture.

Killjoy didn't yet realize that it would be in her twin's absense that she would suddenly find the will and drive that she thought she no longer had, that she had killed in order to escape from Society's claws, and use it to do things she didn't think she was pure enough to do.

Reverb had once run into a philosophy section on a Cybernet magazine, and out of boredom had read the entire section. He never understood it, so it was pushed to the back of his mind. Except, unlike human brains, the unconscious processor never touched it again. Cybertronians were lucky enough to have absolute control over their systems, never wasting their processors or movements on unnecessary thoughts or motion. It was the type of thing which created silence in the mind, but her human half still had control over her in that respect. A programming kept her attention partly on the back burner of her mind, watching, cooking, and revamping old ideas.

The philosopher, Syceron, had said there were three layers to analysis, three layers necessary to create a complete picture of something in the head, three layers to understand a situation fully. The top layer was everything observed at first glance, or the appearance of how things went down. It was the propaganda, the results of a project, and the feel of things interacting without actually knowing how they interacted. The second layer focused on connecting these observations together, where the processor automatically assumed a certain way of how they interacted from heresay. If someone observed a mech watering a helix crystal, and another mech said that the mech made the best helix crystals, then one would assume that watering helix crystals would make the best helix crystals. All one needed to know was what the helix crystals were comprised of, what the liquid was comprised of, and whether or not an experiment of the assumed situation would generate the same result. The third layer focuses on acquiring the beneath the surface information, and it is when this third layer is revealed that that someone quickly discovers that the mech his friend had actually been referring to was on the opposite side of the compound from where he'd been looking at the time.

Suffice to say, looks were deceiving.

The cave walls were dark and damp to her optics, but she had stopped thinking about them a long time ago. She had stopped thinking about anything else really. The deafening silence brought with it a small comfort she couldn't find anywhere else; the knowledge of being utterly alone. There was safety in knowing she was the only living thing within the cave. Safety in knowing that her thoughts were her own and what she would plan would be her own creation.

Reverb had introduced her to a revolutionary idea she should have figured out within the first months of being on board, but the loneliness had most likely eaten aware at her sanity without her knowing (she suspected that her insanity would never go away and that she would have to embrace it and live with it or else doubt every thought that had ever come to her mind). That idea was 'defragging'.

Defragging didn't delete memories, but it did delete records of thought processes. Facts that had been assumed as facts stayed behind while the thoughts that had lead to that assumption were deleted, opinions and useless trivia that wouldn't help her now or later. Afterwards, her mind was much clearer than it had been in vorns and she found the stagnant silence to be both a blessing and a curse.

In the process of defragging, she had also gone ahead and deleted many thought algorithms, the ones that worked when she was human but didn't work now in her computerized brain. They were what she had original thought were the physics of the world, observations she had made while trapped under what could very well have just been a dream (though she was far from cashing in her all her chips on that theory) or simulation and thus not accurate enough to rely on in the real world. It included much of what she had been taught in schools, the useless trivia that didn't add up when put in the larger picture and some of the more 'proven' scientific facts which made no sense now that she had a different world of science at her disposal.

Gravity was not the pull of mass, but the push of empty space. Up and down were mere perceptions created by this illusion, and there were over seven primary colors in the real world. Humans only perceived three.

Things that weren't in use or would never be used until years in the future were copied on a backup drive before being deleted from her main processsor. The result was staggering. Her mind had suddenly cleared of the clutter, allowing her for the first time to see the floor of her once very dirty and messy room. She could now see another layer of thought processings going on in the background, something she had missed while twiddling her thumbs for the last one hundred and sixty years.

Her logic processor had complete control of her mind and had been from the very beginning. Her prediction algorithms were far more advanced that she thought reasonable, able to track the movements of animals and species on the planet and create patterns from it, outlining what the world would be like in eleven years. If she threw in a scenario, a future plan or scheme, she would discover just how quickly it wouldn't work. The more she observed the algorithm at work, the more she was convinced that it had played some major role in her dreamscape – perhaps had even constructed the entire reality from a possible future. If, it was to be believed, that her human world wasn't real.

For an instant, she was looking through a stormy night again, seeing two beams of car lights shatter the misty darkness. She shuddered.

Syceron's theory of mental growth stipulated that any algorithms created at a young age would continue to grow stronger and better as time grew on, creating an expert in a field no one yet had a name for. Her predictability algorithms would become stronger, better, aiding her where _nothing_ theoretically _could_.

Her processor was hard at work filling in her now deleted algorithms with more accurate ones, taking what it observed from her memories and constructing digital web of action and reaction that continued to grow more and more complicated. It was like the biggest ball of twine had developed cellular reproduction while no one was looking and was expanding rapidly, growing more twisted and yet round at the same time. It was organized chaos, the stuff everything was made of. She predicted that, in a few years, her algorithms would be so advanced that she could easily adapt to the changing world around her; not just her processor, but her whole body. Most of this twine ball of algorithms was entirely focused on her transformation cog and changing her physical structure to deal with the world.

She had the edge over others, she realized with a small smile. Even Reverb's processing power didn't have enough energy to create algorithms at this pace, and that very likely meant neither did any other mech on the planet. Not Darklight, not Arachnid, and certainly not the Mentor.

That holomech caused her to grimace, sneer almost, and she quickly turned her attention elsewhere, deciding her hasty assumption required a deeper study. Arachnid had a history of being techno-organic, and though Reverb had no knowledge of this, it didn't rule out the possibility that Arachnid had her organic half to help her create the algorithms necessary for adaptation – in the same way Killjoy had her organic half to help her out, no matter how false it might be.

If Arachnid had real organic matter to help her adapt, especially a organic brain, then she might have more of an edge in adaptation than Killjoy did. That thought left a sour taste in her mouth, and she swallowed it. She decided that she needed to meet the fabled Arachnid face-to-face in order to figure out her pattern, her modus operendi, and hopefully to figure out more about her own mysterious and screwed up past, if Arachnid had been on planet for that long. But Killjoy currently had no way of knowing where Arachnid was, and this fact caused her to turn her thoughts elsewhere.

She needed to evaluate the facts. The Autobots were on the planet, so were the Neutrals and Decepticons, including the Decepticon spy, Darklight. She had a phasing technology that caused her to phase through objects, with the add ability of making her invisible to animals. She hadn't disturbed a single fish, squirrel or ancestor of either on her trip over here. However, the science behind her technology still needed to be figured out, just so she had a better idea of its strengths and weaknesses.

There were so many unknowns that it was overwhelming. No matter how much she thoughtabout something, there's always something else to think about. Something she missed, something she couldn't explain, something else out there.

She shook herself. Thoughts were scary. It never ended. It was endless. Even to someone who didn't like endings, it was scary. It was awesome in its sheer size, but scary in how quickly one could be wrong.

But she had no time to explain, no time to think things through. She had to do something and fast. Earth was in danger. The planet was currently invested with Cybertronians who had a history of not being nice to each other, let alone anything else. There was one confirmed Decepticon, one possible traitor, one stupid Neutral leader and one Autobot commander. Each would have to be evaluated and cataloged before she could plan her next move and inevitably kick them off the planet.

She took a deep breath, steeling herself. She _had_ to do it. Her sisters would never forgive her if she didn't do her best to save the planet – and let's face it, she hadn't been doing her best in, well, _forever_.

There were no second chances. There wasn't any of that "I can retake the test if I fail" or "I can turn in my homework tomorrow, no worries." This was real life, and much more important than some stupid homework quiz. People would die. Her twin would be disappointed.

She had no room for error. It was all on her.

Killjoy could not explain that small part of her who liked it that way. It was all on her – she had no one to answer to, not immediately, and no one to tell her what she _needed_ to do. She had to decided for herself what was best for her planet, because if she didn't act and remain firm on her decision for the next however-long-it-would-be-til-her-sisters-woke-up, she would hesitate and doubt herself. In this line of work, she could not doubt.

Today was the deciding factor. Today, a choice needed to be made.

And no matter how she looked at the situation, the choice was obvious.

She pulled out her hunter's knife, the blue energon blade with the smooth keen top and toothed base, and her optics automatically shifted over to the dead mech, traveling over his armored form. His corpse was a reminder of what she had done – what she was capable of doing at a moment's notice, when she got out of control.

But the last time she had tried to control something, she had failed. What if It wasn't meant to be controlled?

It was like the weather. If you had something powerful enough, like the Pearl of Bahoudin or something else designed to control it, it could be controlled. The only way to control this was to fix it, and she had no expertise in the field. That meant either she had avoid situations that would trigger it and be forced to fix it herself (which would involve an unknown amount of loss of life) or find a mnemosurgeon with enough skill to meld it more seamlessly with the rest of her processor, so she had a better foothold in that state of mind and could stop or start it herself.

Scyeron wasn't wrong about the first three layers. But there was another layer that needed consideration, too.

It was the part of the mind that registered when she had thought too deeply about something; the part of the brain that registered when a swimmer had hit the seafloor and there was nowhere else to swim but up. She hadn't listened to that part for a while. She had been too worried trying to find answers, when what she really needed was to tell her brain to shut up. You can't know everything, so don't try. Just think of everything you _need_ to know about a situation and nothing else.

And what she needed to know was whether or not the Autobots would help her. She needed to know just how far Arachnid was willing to go with her schemes, whatever they might be. She needed to know just who Allout was and just how weak-minded the leader might be, especially when it came time to kill someone. And someone was going to die.

She spun the knife in her palm and sheathed it.


	7. Ark-One

It would have been best if she had left the knife behind.

But hindsight was twenty-twenty and even though _common sense_ dictated that she leave it behind simply because her self-defense programming was so unpredictable, she just couldn't leave the only weapon she had in a cave in the middle of nowhere.

Besides that, leaving her murder-stick in the same room as the victim just didn't seem like a brilliant idea. She had no idea if spark signatures could be traced from weapon to victim and weapon to holder, but she had no interest in discovering it could happen, even if it happened accidentally and in the not-too-distant future. All evidence pointed to her being extremely outnumbered on this planet, and she could imagine many different ways she might end up captured, destroyed or _worse_.

No, leaving it behind was a bad idea, and going to hide it back at base was simply out of the question, so she kept it with her as she neared the alien spacecraft. The big yellow-gold ship looked like a stylized SR-71, but thicker and blunted at the front, much like the Ark was before it crashed. It had an entire level added onto the top, with windows on all sides pointing out to the landscape over her head. The clunky vessel had four huge square engines on its aft, each as big as the ship was wide, and most of the vessel that wasn't landing gear or open hatch was on top of a whole stretch of crushed and splintered trees.

Her optics scored the ship, noting how low it was to the ground. She would have hunch over to get underneath, and she was not nearly as big as the four guards clustered around the entrance. A thin line of mecha (mostly the smooth and curvy femme types) carried energon cubes and metal crates up and down the ramp, some disappearing inside while others disappeared into the forest. There were always about seven mecha in sight, guards not included, no matter where she turned her helm. Not a single one of them was an Autobot.

The ship was too far away for her to get aboard without being spotted. She might be invisible to organics while phasing through objects, but she had no way of knowing if any of these mechs couldn't detect her by other means, like the Mentor had. Attracting the attention of these mechas wouldn't help her cause at all, especially if Darklight suspected foul play when it came to the disappearance of Reverb. She did not want to be anywhere near the suspected traitor, and she did not really want any of the Neutrals to even think she existed, which left her with little reason to actually speak with any Autobot, let alone Vibes. If the Autobots knew she existed, then so would the Neutrals. Killjoy doubted Vibes would keep anything like that a secret from her Autobots and she had no idea if someone could leak the information to the neutrals somewhere down the line.

Now that she was standing here, thinking about the reprecussions of anything she might do, she realized that she had a lot to lose from speaking with the Autobots, as well as a lot to gain. She began to move away from the ship and follow the trail deeper into the forest, curiosity driving her even though she no longer had interest in following through with her original plan.

The clearing they had set up in was much large than the one their ship had crashed on top of. Stones and boulders had been quickly pushed out of the way, leaving patches of dark brown soil upturned to the sun. Grass had been trampled, most of the broken stalks already turning brown and yellow in the sunlight, giving the clearing a sickly atmosphere. The green and yellow was juxtaposed by the stark grey of the massive platform at the clearing's center, mounted on four sharp legs at each point. Only one other thing touched the ground, a seismic monitor that mapped out the entire Earth's crust on its holographic globe and rippled in areas where there was seismic activity. The faster each dot pulsed, the greater the seismic activity. All the other equipment was kept on the platform, along with many different colored cubes of energon, from green and pink to purple and yellow. The only thing missing was a blue energon cube. No matter where she looked, there wasn't one to be found. Some of the monitoring devices were hooked up to the energon cubes, but instead of the energon inside the cube disappearing to be used by the machine it was slowly increasing.

It was like one massive Harvester platform.

And Killjoy didn't like it one bit.

She crept around the platform, her optics scoring the many different femme frames that stood on top of the platform. They came in all sorts of alien colors, rarely taking on blue, green or brown colorations. Some had the golden-yellow of the sun, but it was tinted in such a way that it looked off and out of place in the greenery. Everything stood out like a sore thumb.

No one noticed the lone black and white that marched around the ship in a silent angry storm, circling the whole ship with all the predatory grace of a curious shark. When she found herself back at the front of the platform, where a ramp touched down on the planet's surface, she started up it, optics still scoring the masses.

She had forgotten what she had been looking for after her disgust with them standing out like a beacon took over, but now that she actually did start looking for cherry red Autobot insignias, she was extremely disappointed that most of the femmes who had them were busy dealing with the equipment. Her optics absorbed the data on the screens, noting the color of the energon that poured out of them and feeling increasingly unhappy with everything surrounding her. Solar energy, wind energy, thermal energy, and every other kind of energy was slowly being absorbed and converted into energon. She knew nothing about the process of energon, whether it could be recycled back into the Earth or it the conversion process was permanently removing it from the atmosphere, and that made her worry. If this kept up for too long and it didn't help in the Earth's natural recycling ecosystem, it could be potentially harmful to the planet and any future intelligent life that would live here – humans specifically.

Reverb's information was right in one aspect – nearly everyone on the platform, even the giant tank mech who stood out amongst the femme types like the whole Cybertronian race stood out from the Earth, was female. Reverb's information about the differences in spark signature didn't help her tell the difference; her sensors were so radically different from his that she couldn't match up what she reading from her doorwings from his own sensor readings. The only male amongst them was a very familiar black yellow-opticked and very unhappy looking mech, who hovered around the giant she-mech with the tenacity and tolerating patience of someone who has obviously had enough but no one really noticed. She avoided him, and the giant who was blind to his hatred of being there and swooned over him with her optics. Darklight was not her problem; he was the Autobot's.

The one femme she was looking for was nowhere to be found. The cherry red paintjob, large triangular audio fins were impossible to miss – even with Killjoy's own track record of only being able to find things that stuck out like a sore thumb – and it quickly put Killjoy in a foul mood.

Vibes was not here.

She started down the ramp when something stopped her from taking a pedestep off onto the dirt. Two femmes stood off to the side, the line of mecha giving them nods or greetings as they passed. But that wasn't what had caught her attention about these two. Her doorwings flicked up and forward, absorbing their spark signatures instantly and filing them away for future reference.

"I swear to you, there's a spy amongst us," said other femme, her voice sound ambiguously masculine. Her entire frame looked extremely ambiguous, as if she couldn't decide whether or not to be femme or mech. Even her signature wasn't as clear cut like all the others. From her red, white and black paintjob, her unique helm design, and the bright sparks on her helm horns, Killjoy almost mistook her for Red Alert. Even her attitude screamed _Red Alert_.

"There isn't a spy, and there aren't any pedeprints," responded Vibes, her voice was smooth and naturally soothing. It took Killjoy a moment to realize that she was speaking Cybertronian, a different accent from the other, but definitely not English. She chalked that up to another thing she had picked up from Reverb, though she honestly couldn't remember actually downloading the language files. Vibes sighed. "I know this planet is strange and new to you – it's new to us all – but we have to learn to adapt to the environment and account for all the unknown variables before we start pointing the digit and panicking everyone."

"I'm not pointing the digit at dust mites here," he-she-it responded, annoyed. "Nothing stirs dust except animals and mecha, and these are too big for any of the indigenous lifeforms around here." Blue optics swept the landscape. "It _has_ to be an invisible spy."

"But these pedeprints – if they exist at all – are too light for any mech of the size that would fit them," she said, "unless you're suggesting that there are a few mechs on planet that have already adapted to the environment and float on air."

"Well, there _could_ be. We don't know anything about what is on this planet, whether there are Decepticons here or no."

"We didn't register any while we were in space."

"But that could be caused by a number of reasons," it said, before dropping to a whisper, "our resident Decepticon spy being the most obvious."

"Yes, that is true," Vibes said slowly.

Killjoy couldn't even believe what she had just heard –they had come to an alien world without knowing what dangers were on it and they were stupid enough to know about a Decepticon traitor and not route it out. Suddenly, Killjoy didn't think these femmes could help her in her mission at all – in fact, their leader's obvious stupidity might very well end up doing the exact opposite of what she wanted.

"We could be dealing with savages, or barbarians." The way it said the word 'Barbarian' almost made Killjoy laugh – it sounded so much like Red Alert from the G1 cartoon.

"Red Alert, _please_ ," Vibes said, her voice a soft hiss that could barely be heard, if not for Killjoy's doorwings perking up into a V at the mech's name and her moving a step closer in her shock. "If you think this calls for more detailed procedures, you are going to have to file a report. Right now, I need to oversee operations onboard Ark-One."

Red Alert – who Killjoy could no longer think of as a she, since that whispered name had the male Cybertronian glyph tacked on to the end – sputtered and ground his denta in frustration. "Yes, Sub-Commander," he gritted out.

"Thank you," Vibes said, relieved. "I'll see you at the staff meeting in a few. Have your report ready by then."

"Yes, ma'am," he said, but his voice told her he would not enjoy it.

Killjoy watched Vibes disappeared into the forest, giving every femme along the way a friendly greeting. The newly dubbed Red Alert remained where he was, his optics returned to scanning the ground while thoughts whirled behind his dark blue optics. Even now, Killjoy did not doubt Red Alert still believed that some phantom was walking amongst them, and Killjoy found it more amusing than she should have at the whole situation. She pitied Red Alert, knowing he was right but in no circumstance to comfort him about the truth of his findings. She waited until he started to head off toward the ship, before she silently followed.

The trip to the ship felt a lot longer than the trip to the platform, and impatience radiated from her frame as Red Alert halted every once and a while to check out a noise he heard, most of the time it turned out to be nothing more than a tiny curious animal. Once or twice, Killjoy swore that he picked up on her pedesteps again, but she walked through the foliage and didn't stir a leaf, which meant any pedeprints she did make were already covered by the greenery. She wondered for a moment about what Red Alert might do if he discovered undisturbed bushes with pedeprints under them – probably do a little bit more than freak out. Killjoy huffed a laugh and cracked a smile, her systems freezing as she thought for a second that Red Alert heard her. He had heard other things which had been quite quieter than her guffaw and she was kicking herself in the aft for making any noise.

But Red Alert kept walking as if the forest was as dead and still as the night, his attention on everything else but her. She frowned, an inkling of an idea suddenly beginning to form in her mind. The trail of femmes to her left hadn't noticed her laugh either, or perhaps they had assumed it had been Red Alert – and Red Alert might have assumed the noise had come from one of the femmes. She doubted that was the case, but decided not to push her luck and kept quiet for the rest of the trip.

The golden-yellow mouth of the ship was even more crowded than when she had left it. The four guards had disappeared, replaced by workers who had stopped to take a break and used the crates of energon as seats as they consumed funny-colored energon. Even the old energon Killjoy had back on board her ship had residual colors of blue, which none of these samples of energon shared. Killjoy kept following Red Alert as he weaved his way through them, and they greeted him with false cheer, annoyance, nastiness or just outright ignored him. He ignored all of them and kept walking, and Killjoy trailed after him up the ramp and into the heart of the ship.

The minute Red Alert stepped aboard the ship, his posture changed. His shoulders relaxed, his frame settled more comfortably on his body, and he straightened. Killjoy hadn't even realized how tense he had been out in the field or how focused he had been on the ground, and she gave a sad smile. Paranoid Red Alert was paranoid, and he had every right to be. She was standing right behind him, after all.

She followed him to his office, where he pulled out a blue glass rectangular object framed by metal with glyphs that danced across the glass. The screen shifted like an iPad as he put a stylus to it and began writing out a report. Killjoy shifted uncomfortably as she waited for him to finish. It felt like she was back home, a human that most people ignored, unless she said something important. She shifted when he was done and he pulled out a datachip and left the datapad on his table, leaving it on his table as he walked out. Killjoy followed him as he went a few doors over to what could only be Vibes' office, though the Autobot's Sub-Commander was nowhere to be found. He deposited the datachip on her desk, put it underneath the only datapad on her desk and then walked out. Killjoy hovered inside the office as the door closed, tempted to snatch the datachip but decided against it. She phased through the door and barely managed to catch up to Red Alert before he disappeared down a corrider. She followed him everywhere, growing increasingly impatient as time passed on. It seemed that he was never going to go to the meeting and that bothered her. She amused herself by phasing through walls and sticking her head through doors into areas of the Ark Red Alert never once ventured near, like the Medbay. Everywhere else seemed fair game to the Security Director, but he avoided the Medbay like the plague. Killjoy chalked that up to Ratchet not being there to force him to get a check-up.

Finally, when Red Alert finished off the last section of the base Killjoy hadn't already seen, he started off again and Killjoy found them both back in his own office. He dropped off a datachip, which he seemed to pull out of thin air, and buried it inside his desk inside a drawer which apparently had a secret compartment Killjoy never saw him open, before he grabbed his datapad and left again. This time, though, he arrived at the Commander Center, where most of the other commanders had already taken up seats and pulled out their own datapads, which were mostly blank. Killjoy took special note of the lack of a wall between the Commander Center's main station and the massive long table that made up the meeting room, and watched with approval as Red Alert navigated around the table until his back was facing the wall and most of the room was in his sights. Vibes was already to his right and she leaned forward to gesture to her comm. lines and suddenly they were consumed by their private conversation. Killjoy suddenly felt extremely isolated, unable to take part in any conversation or even touch them without alerting them to her presence. She shook herself mentally and made notes on those in the room, noting the Autobot brands that marked every single person in the room as an Autobot. Darklight and Allout weren't invited to this meeting.

Pretty soon, the tables and chairs and filled up, except for one at the other end to Vibes, when the center of the table suddenly rose. A holographic projector transformed up and out of the table, powering up without any preamble. Seven different holographic screens suddenly began projecting images of extremely familiar mechs, and bright beams focusing on Red Alert and Vibes and five others, projecting the their likenesses across space to however many mechs were really on the other side. She looked around, observing the softer light beams as they focused on everyone else in room. Her attention turned to the familiar faces on the screens, and she felt strange putting names to the stranger's faces before they even spoke.

" _Good orn, Vibes_ ," greeted the blue-helmed facemask mech that could only be Optimus Prime. " _I trust your mission is successful?_ " It was almost a statement but for the curious lilt on the last sound.

"As successful as Allout has a mind to make it, Optimus Prime, sir," agreed Vibes. "Our main difficulties lie in the environment itself and all the unknown variables the organic life presents."

" _I trust your efforts to cultivate energon have not damaged the surrounding the organic life. They may not have sparks or share our sentience, but they certainly do not deserve to lose their planet._ "

" _A very nice sentiment, Optimus,_ " came the soothing sound of Optimus' mate, Elita-One. Killjoy knew from her voice that she did not entirely support Optimus' sentiment, but her posture said she was behind her bonded 110 percent. " _I'm sure Vibes has been doing her best._ "

" _Indeed,_ " came the not-as-soothing but nevertheless rich voice of Optimus' head tactician. Killjoy felt chills run up her backstrut at that voice, and she smiled giddily as one of her old fantasies suddenly came true. She finally got to meet – even though in a vague sense – one of her favorite characters from the show. " _But the lives of countless sentients outway the lives of non-sentients._ "

Optimus sighed, sounding as if he had heard this argument multiple times and even though he agreed with it he wasn't about to like anything that entailed. Killjoy felt something cold nestle in her tanks, but she couldn't immediately put it into words.

" _Agreed, old friend,_ " the Prime said. " _How has energon production progressed?_ "

"Energon production has proceeded on schedule and without any interruption," said the femme on Vibes' other side, her green paintjob making her stick out amongst the other more non-earthy colors, with red and yellow colored parts on her arms and legs. Killjoy was too unfamiliar with her character to recognize her as Botanica. "However, the process is much slower than anticipated, almost as if the planet itself is trying to prevent us from taking it."

Killjoy's processor went silent, absorbing this observation like someone who didn't believe but didn't entirely disbelieve the sentiment. The other Autobots groaned and sighed in their disbelief, but the femme didn't flinch and remained erect in her chair, unaffected.

"Be that as it may," Vibes said, grabbing everyone's attention and shushing them without even calling attention to their actions, "Botanica is right. _Something_ is fighting the process. We have had numerous incidents where our equipment has malfunction and we have reason to believe that there is either a spy amongst us or –" and Vibes glanced discretely at Red Alert, "-or a native which has yet to reveal itself or its intent to us."

Killjoy perked up at that, entertaining for a brief moment the thought that there was another invisible mech running around phasing through objects and wrecking havoc on the Autobot's equipment. Then she realized it was more likely that Darklight was causing the problems. From the brief expression on Jazz's face, Killjoy could only assume that he thought the very same thing, but the Special Ops Agent's face smoothed out to his regular easy-going expression, making Killjoy almost doubt his face had changed at all. Perhaps Vibes had communicated more in her statement than anyone else could guess at, Killjoy thought, especially if she was Special Ops. Killjoy could not dismiss that possibility.

" _A native?_ " came Ironhide's rumbling dialect. He gave a snort. " _If that's the case, then y'all should have detecting them while still in space._ "

"We believe that there might be something in the atmosphere blocking our sensors," came a new voice, from a femme Killjoy's didn't at all recognize. "Our department is still studying the strange development of this planet, and the only conclusion we have right now is that it's upper layer of this atmosphere blocking spark signatures and other types of signature based energies from getting out into space. This planet might very well be engineered to protect the natives on it."

" _Are you sure about this?_ " asked Prowl, his blue optics dark and thoughtful but voice as attentive and commanding as ever. Killjoy felt her lips curl in a smirk.

"As sure as we can be given how much we don't know about this planet," she said slowly, glancing at Botanica as if to ask 'is this okay?' "If there really are natives here, and I mean _Cybertronian based_ natives, then they might very well not like us being here ruining this beautiful design they have here or destroying the balance they have created for the organics."

Botanica might have done something in response to that silent inquiry but Killjoy didn't see it as her attention focused on Perceptor, who's face had appeared on screen, replacing what could only be Ultra Magnus' profile.

" _An interesting notion,_ " he said, " _I would like to investigate into that thought myself. Botanica, Greenlight, please send me your data at the earliest possible conveneince for you. Mayhaps I can find more evidence of other Cybernetic life on that world._ "

" _It would be nice to have their aid,_ " agreed Optimus Prime. " _Is there any other news?_ "

The moment of silence was enough for everyone to shake their helms in negative. Killjoy frowned, realizing that the strangely short meeting was about to come to a close.

" _Very well,_ " said the Prime. " _We will reconvene in another vorn as scheduled. Be safe, Autobots._ "

Vibes gave a soft smile. "Same to you, Prime."

The meeting came to a close and Killjoy watched in silence as the femmes began to file out of the room. Vibes stayed behind, wishing a good day to Red Alert as he moved out. Killjoy did not follow, rooted to the spot, absorbing everything she had heard. When Vibes finally began to move again, Killjoy was drawn out of her musings. The red femme pressed her digits beneath the table rim and suddenly the hologram started up again.

" _Vibes?_ " came the smooth sound of Jazz's voice. His black helm came into view moments later, the familiar visor catching Killjoy's attention.

"I'm here, Jazz," Vibes said almost soothingly.

Jazz smiled, not the suave smile he normally wore but a tired smile reserved especially for someone very close to his spark. Killjoy hadn't realized until that moment that Jazz truly loved Vibes – she had half-expected it to be like fanfiction, where Jazz actually loved Prowl. But no one, not even Jazz, could fake that tender look, that look of longing that only bondeds could share. She felt as if she was intruding on their privacy and wanted to leave, but something kept her rooted to the spot.

"How are you?" she asked sofly, a smirk playing on her red lips.

He chuckled. " _You're the one who's on an alien planet_ ," he rumbled.

"I'm not the one caught up in the frontlines." A sad tease.

" _Touché_." Humorless rumble.

A comfortable silence fell over the two, juxtaposed by Killjoy's own slightly awkward silence. Her red optics trailed the ground, doorwings drooping. She almost looked like a human at prayer, eyes closed and head down in respectful silence.

" _How are you feeling?_ " Concern, slight guilt.

A red servo scraped against a red chest. "I'm fine." Genuine gratitude, but slight sorrow.

Silence.

The femme shifted in her seat. "It's alright, Jazz."

" _You… just be careful, alright?_ "

"I am always careful," she purred. "You trained me, remember?"

" _Yeah._ "

The awkward silence made Killjoy shift, and she listened to the scraping sound echo hollowly in the Command room. Her doorwings twitched at the strange sound and she found the feedback disturbing; it was like she wasn't standing in a room at all, but on flatlands, with emptyness stretching out everywhere. But at the same time, there was an echo.

The two bondeds bathed in each other's presence for as long as they were allowed to, stretching out the deathly silence. They were oblivious to Killjoy's growing discomfort, both in the presense of the private moment and the realization she wasn't standing in the real world anymore. She remembered the bright yellow-golden entrance, how drab it seemed now she was on the inside, phased out of shift. It prickled her mind, niggled her, like a word or phrase at the tip of her glossa. She recognized where she was, but at the same time didn't understand _where_ she was.

" _I have ta go,_ " Jazz said. Love, sorrow, regret. He cracked a smile. " _Make sure you pick up the package, alright?_ "

"Of course," she responded, professionalism coloring her voice.

He nodded, before shrugging apologetically. " _They can't do anything without me._ "

Vibes smiled sadly. "Love you, Jazz."

His smile shifted, suddenly more genuine but not up to its perky self. This was the real Jazz, Killjoy decided; the Jazz that was hidden behind a perfect but fake smile wherever he went. She was awed that she was seeing it, but dirty because she wasn't supposed to. She tip-toed toward the door, pausing when she realized Vibes was still sitting in front of the table. She looked weak and vulnerable, hunched over her chair and staring at her digits as they traced lines in the metalwork. Killjoy didn't want to stay any longer, but her spark had gone out at the sight. She hated leaving Vibes alone like this, and tip-toed away from the door to stand like a dark sentinel behind Vibes. When Vibes still didn't move, Killjoy stared over her should at the holographic projector. Waves and waves of pain, grief, sorrow and love seemed to radiate from Vibes, washing over Killjoy's doorwings sensors as a fluctuating spark signature.

Then, Vibes suddenly stood up, and Killjoy realized too late that she was standing too close to the red femme. She stepped back, freezing up as Vibes suddenly whipped around and headed for the door – walking straight through Killjoy. The black and white she-mech shuddered, now more uncomfortable than she'd ever been. A part of her had wanted Vibes to see her. She grimaced as she turned towards Vibes, already disappearing through the door. It took only a second before Killjoy was following.

It was like following Red Alert, but everything was different. Vibes spoke to nearly everyone she ran into, in a tiring series of greetings and good-byes. Killjoy processor spun with all the new names – Gearstick, Greenlight, Lancer, Strongarm…. The names went on. Killjoy wasn't very good at remember names anyway, and the words quickly spun away into oblivion in her head. It made her feel more left out of the world. Ignored. Like a ghost.

A spike of pain suddenly exploded in her chest and she halted, gasping in a vent. Her vision blackened, her knees buckled, and she might have collapsed if not for some small scrap of willpower that hastened to restart her systems, racing through her mind like a darting petrorabbit. She pressed up against the wall, her doorwings fanning out to catch the full effect of the cool surface. Her optics shuttered online and she found the golden-yellow world more bright than she remembered. She pressed an arm beneath her praxian-style chest, feeling her body writhe in the pain in her spark.

"Hey! Are you alright?"

Her optics darted sideways, staring at the strange neutral who had dared to speak out at her. Her mind instantly registered the problem – she was visible. She grunted, pushing herself off the wall and staggering slightly as she regained her balance.

"I-I'm fine," she said, voice shaky but firm. The strange deep voice reverberated in her audios, unrecognizable. Her voice? When did it become so… baritone? "I'm alright."

"Perhaps you should let Botanica or one of her scientists take a look at-" the femme paused, a servo coming up to her audio.

Killjoy's armor suddenly prickled, Red Alert's faceplate flashing across her optics. She reached out mentally to push the phasing technology into activation, but was rewarded with a warning across her HUB. The system needed to reset. 26% complete.

"Uh-" said the femme, suddenly backing away. Killjoy's doorwings fluttered, latching onto the movement like a predator onto prey, her self-defense programming threatening to activate and _kill_. "-I-I-I should probably g-go."

She turned and fled, but Killjoy didn't follow. Her self-defense programming shut up the moment the femme's back was turned. At least, she mused to herself in a moment of inane thought, she wouldn't be stabbing people in the back anytime soon. Her spark was writhing in pain, oblivious to the danger it was now in.

She immediately began to walk away from where the femme went. The almost black-out had left her shaky on her pedes and she staggered as she moved, her arm grasping her chest. She scrambled to open the door, but it rejected her with a cherry beep, light on the door panel glowing red. Growling, she pushed herself off the wall, her claw-like digits scrambling to open every door and her self-defense programming jumping at nearly every noise. She heard mecha scrambling across the ground and saw a dark shape slide across the opening at the end of the hall. She slid, crouching down, gun raised, and disappeared as quickly as she appeared. A weapon went off and Killjoy staggered, hissing at the sudden jerk against her shoulder.

Someone banged against the wall, an angry reprimand at the weaponfire. Opposite the shooter, someone else had the brilliant idea to open fire. Killjoy staggered with the weight of the weapon's fire, collapsing onto her knees. Her processor whirled; she could do nothing against ranged weaponry. Her processor scrambled to find a ranged weapon, but her only known asset was her hunting knife. She wasn't entirely sure that was a good thing or bad.

 _My self-defense programming probably knows,_ she thought morbidly. _Since it knew about the knife._

She tried to activate her phase-shifter again, but her HUB informed her that it was only 68 percent rebooted. There was the tall-tale clicking of a dead gun and the loud "Whoops" that followed was slightly encouraging. She rolled onto her aft, doorwings flaring as she rocked backward and pushed off, legs whipping her body up so that she was back on her pedes. That sudden movement kickstarted her self-defense program, and she saw blue flash in her peripheral. She glanced down in time to see a hard-light shield suddenly expand from her arm, three pointed top and sharp bottom. No one moved to shoot another round.

70 percent.

_Primus, how complicated was this phase shifter? It shouldn't be taking this long to reboot!_

_Wait, since when did hardware need to reboot? Just turn it off and back on and it should be working!_

She almost did turn it off and back on, but decided that since she had waited this long, three more minutes weren't going to kill her. After all, with advanced and unfamiliar computers, it might do more harm than good.

At least they had stopped shooting her.

"Identify yourself!"

_Fragging Primus!_

How do you _stall_?

"…je ne comprehend pas?" And that was all the French she knew.

 _How bad could this_ get _?_

The silence stretched for a few seconds longer than necessary. The she-mech felt strangely like she could keep her pose all day, her whole body tense and armor bristling, energon running smoothly through her systems, her processor hyper aware of every algorithm in motion inside her cortex. She gave a low snarl, shifting on her pedes.

74 percent…

" _Why are you just standing around!?_ "

The sudden booming voice sent chills through her burning spark. A knee joint buckled but she caught herself before her knee hit the floor. Her shield came up to make up for her sudden slip up and she whipped around towards the voice. One big shoulder poked out from behind a corner. Her doorwings registered big female. She-mech.

_Allout._

" _Get that Decepticon off my ship!_ "

That voice reminded her of a whiny toddler, demanding mama to pick her up. She cracked a smile.

A black mech peeked around the corner, yellow optics flashing. Her humor vanished.

81 percent…

"It might not be a Decepticon," came the retort, the familiar tones of Vibes. The lovestruck bonded was gone, replaced by cold steel. It caught Killjoy completely off guard, even though she knew it shouldn't have. Her spark ached.

An imaged flashed over her face and she felt her spark spike. She had felt love like that only once. Only one person made her feel the same love that burned behind Jazz's visor, colored Vibes' voice. It made her spark _burn_ thinking about her. Her twin. Who sat dead on a cold table far beneath the ocean. Who couldn't feel even the shred of a bond Primus had gifted her with. It felt like her spark was screaming. She staggered.

84 percent…

"…be a native."

"It's a Decepticon," Allout snarled. "Red optics, dark armor – it can't be anything else."

89 percent…

Darklight's optics flashed.

Almost mockingly.

Another shade of gold flashed. Another face. Pitch black armor. She-mech. Facemask. Praxian. Not Darklight. Darklight was Polyhexian, like Jazz but bigger. Bigger than Killjoy was, anyway. Smaller than Calypso. Calypso the black she-mech, goddess of the seas, with the facemask to mark herself as a warrior. Also back home, ignoring Killjoy over the bond.

When they were awake, she went by a different name.

Killjoy suddenly found herself putting her own size in perspective. She hadn't met anyone yet who was smaller. Even Jazz, notoriously large for a minibot, was bigger. That made her a minibot, right?

_Funny what thoughts go through your mind when you're in pain._

It almost felt good.

"Look again. The doorwings, the chevron – if that's not a Praxian than I'm not a femme. And you and I both know that every Praxian joined us after Praxus fell."

That sentence brought another stab of pain through her – a different kind of pain. A flash of black and white entered her mind, red chevron. Prowl, her hero. Prowl, the tactician. Prowl, the greatest processor on Cybertron. At least, to Killjoy. Bluestreak… Smokescreen… she shuddered. He wouldn't be hers. He was someone she knew by name and reputation and rumor, through second-hand stories, but not someone she would ever be able to truly call 'old friend'.

_Everything is messed up._

She was on her knees, leaning on her shield. She hadn't realized she was doing it until she realized everyone was silent. Three more mech had joined Darklight in looking at me. Vibes, Allout, and someone she didn't know. Botanica, perhaps?

93 percent…

"I've never seen a Praxian with a shield like that," snapped Darklight.

"We didn't know Praxians had missile launchers and shoulder cannons until Praxus was attacked. Besides, she's harmless," responded Vibes coolly. "Especially with her spark surging like that."

"It's curious," said the forth mech. "Do you think her triadmates can feel her?"

_Triadmates?_

"She might not be bonded," said Vibes.

_Dead wrong._

"We don't know if she's harmless. She could be more dangerous _now_ than in her normal state of mind," Darklight pointed out. "We've had tacticians go haywire, warriors go beserk – who's to say her spark damage hasn't triggered something like that for her?"

 _Valid point, traitorous scrapheap_ , she seethed. She had lost the ability to speak moments ago, but frankly she wasn't even trying at this point.

96 percent…

Vibes nodded. "We'll wait for her to cool off."

"And give her the opportunity to escape with our location?" snapped Allout, furious. "We don't even know how she got on the ship in the first place!"

"She was invisible before Sheen found her," Vibes admitted.

"Perhaps her spark fluctuating is what caused her to become visible," piped up the fourth mech. "Since she hadn't disappeared on us yet."

98 percent…

_Holy fragging Primus, how many times are they going to hit the nail on the head?_

Killjoy was impressed.

She had been so focused on the verbal argument that she hadn't registered her spark slowly stabilizing. The pain was much more bearable now, her spark mewling soundless in her chest.

"That's it, let's stun 'er aft!"

The sound came from behind her, and she whipped around so fast, she amazed herself – her speed, her power. It was exhilarating. Shots reverberated off her shield, and cracks forming in the surface. Hardlight wasn't meant to actually hold up in combat. Perhaps it was just as practice shield?

Her self-defense program roared to life suddenly and she did a sweeping kick at the femme, knocking her down before driving her knife into her – she started, missing her spark and slamming the blade into her shoulder, slicing through metal. The femme beneath her screamed, and the sound pierced the growing fog in her mind. She wretched her hand back, forgetting that her blade was still clasped tightly in her hold and ripping it out. She jumped back, shocked that she had almost killed again and more surprised that the self-defense program hadn't been as strong this time as last. She hadn't killed the female.

_Why?_

100 percent.

"That does it!"

"Darklight, no!"

She was moving faster than she could think. Her shield smashed into the mech, and she _felt_ his weight give from beneath her. The power, the strength – it was _great_. She slammed him into the wall, backing off just as quickly. She hesitated, absorbing her newfound abilities and relishing in it, watching him grasp his shoulder. She hadn't even registered the sound of it cracking.

Movement behind her sent her processor spinning to activating her phrase shifter even as she turned towards the movement. She watched Darklight in her peripheral lunge, but the world became drab and he flew right threw her. The sweeping feet aimed at her legs passed harmlessly through. Killjoy had vanished like smoke. She backed away from the mech and femme, both staring stupidly where she had been.

Killjoy chuckled.

The ground suddenly no longer supported her and she dropped out of the ship, rolling as she landed amongst broken trees. She paused, one trunk harmlessly piercing her chest. She chortled, a hand clamping over her mouth. She staggered away, stumbling her way back to her familiar landmark before collapsing, shaking with laughter. Her processor whirled, her spark still burned, but she chuckled.

Moaning softly, she pulled herself to her shaking pedes, wondering why she hadn't collapsed yet or blacked-out, like she did a few times in the past vorn. This didn't seem anything like her other episodes – much more painful. Lot less offlining.

But the only one who could answer all these questions was back at that underwater base, and she knew from the dark feelings bubbling inside of her that she wasn't going back there anytime soon. She needed rest and the only place where she could rest was back at the cliff cave with the dead body.

Struggling to her shaky feet, she began moving through the drab-colored world, her thoughts feeling like icy snow. Equally as soft, equally as icy, and colder still.

* * *


	8. Deception

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Astroseconds = about 1 microsecond.  
> Klik = 1.2 minutes  
> Breem = 8.3 minutes. | 7 kliks.  
> Joor = 6.5 hours. | 47 breems.  
> Orn = 13.5 days. | 50 joors.  
> Deca-Orn = 135 days. | 500 joors./10 orns.  
> Vorn = 83 years. | 225 deca-orns.  
> Stellar Cycles =1079 years. | 13 vorns

The dark tunnels were out of the way, unassuming and sheltered, the perfect place to sit down and once again defrag. Her thoughts immediately turned to her memories.

She had promised herself she'd investigate into what had caused her sudden transformation, to revisit those few moments before her "death". She fought the overwhelming urge to call it a dream, and her awakening last vorn just that – an awakening. It was so difficult to connect the here and now with the then. So much had changed and there wasn't anything to help connect the dots.

It was if part of her brain was translating the human creatures into Cybertronian – their language became clicks and whirls, their faces became metal masks, and their eyes turned crystal and glowed. She recognized her sisters – her twin, Rhyme, and Oracle, Calypso and Hex. It was struggle to remember their human names and faces and she stored both versions of them in her mind, marking the organic ones as the original. She did not want to wake up one morning in the near distant future to find that her memory was no long featuring organic characters. She could no longer think in English anymore – everything was turning Cybertronian.

If she had paused a moment to think, she might have been terrified. As it was, the moment she realized what was happening, her mind suddenly kicked into overdrive to work around the invisible program that was reprogramming her. Everything started to get mislabeled, tricking the program into not touching them. It was almost like she was defragging, but this time she was not deleting unnecessary thought processes, but storing her memories away so that they couldn't be found. Only a vague reference to them remained behind, and the knowledge that she had once really been organic. Those were the memories she built upon, and the other set of memories ended after she got hit by a car. Anyone to look inside her head would see those and think she was a walking dead mech, a terrible zombie that could think as cleverly as any world-renown genius.

She sat back against the smooth cave walls, pondering at the silent darkness surrounding her, remembering for a moment a science experiment. A few decades before she had departed, a scientist had gathered up a few criminal volunteers to live in a box for forty-days without any external stimulation. They say on couches and beds for less than four days, their eyes covered and ear muffs around their ears, and they started going insane – hearing voices, seeing things, and feeling phantom touches on their skin. Humans craved outside contact, but she had spent little over a human lifetime trapped underwater with no interest in getting to the surface. Could she still be considered sane? Than again, she was Cybertronian now. The rules had changed. The psychology was different.

 _I am now 101-years-old_ , she mused. She felt like Aang from the last Avatar, except it had only been eighty-three years instead of a hundred. A full vorn, plus nineteen years as a human. It was mind boggling.

She was immortal, and yet nothing had changed. Eighty-three years had passed like they were nothing. She should be an old woman right now, should be way more mature than she currently was, but time had passed like it meant nothing. She hated that

She paused, listening to the steady and rhythmic drip-drip of water falling somewhere not far away. She was in a new world now, a new place, with information from what she assumed was the future – a future which happened in an alternate would. At least, she guessed it was a future, since she had yet to see anything – from species to man – that she recognized as a modern adaptation. There was nothing to think about there, nothing to contemplate or expand on through carefully thought out questions and carefully extricated answers.

With a sigh, her thoughts turned towards _Ark-One_.

It could not be a coincident that _Ark-One_ shared the same naming and numbering system as those in the comic books. The fact that it was called _Ark-One_ meant that it was created first out of the series of _Ark_ designs, which begged the question of whether the only ships the Autobots had were _Ark_ s or if these Autobots gave away _Ark_ -ships to Neutrals like candy to kids on Halloween. Killjoy wouldn't put it passed Optimus Prime, especially if he decided it was the only way to help preserve some small fraction of the Neutral population of she-femmes. In fact, Killjoy wouldn't be surprised if that was the only reason they'd been sent out here and given the Autobot escort into the unknown reaches of space.

If Earth was unknown to the modern Cybertronian civilization. She wouldn't put it past Cybertronians to invent someway to measure and map the universe through mathematical calculations of the stars and planets, much in the same way scientists used a distant planet's shadow over a much more distant star to determine its size, location and shape. Cybertronians had a much more accurate math system than any human could hope to dream up, but they lacked the imagination and sheer speed that a human possessed when it came to figuring things out. Perhaps they had not invented such a system, simply because they lacked the creativity and imagination human's possessed. She did not know and perhaps could never know.

She shook herself, returning her attention to _Ark-One._

Sub-Commander Vibes kept regular updates with Optimus Prime and Prowl, perhaps every vorn. Optimus' knowledge of the situation on Earth meant that they had been on Earth for a while and the short update had just been that – an update on current events. That meant the Autobots had been on Earth for a long time already. If they had landed a whole vorn ago, perhaps it had been them who had caused her to wake up. If they had landed a vorn ago, that meant they'd been on Earth a vorn, and a quick peek into Reverb's memories only confirmed her thoughts.

When they had first stumbled upon Earth, the Autobots and Neutrals had first kept an orbit around Earth, scanning the surface for a whole vorn just to try and pierce the strange electrical interference they couldn't detect. Any organic planet's surface was a swarm of unfamiliar variables that the Cybertronians would have taken thousands of years to pick up on, but she got the impression from Reverb's memories that there was something more to Earth than there had been to any other planet. That she wasn't detected was no surprise.

She had been deep underground and deep underwater, disguising her spark signature and whatever else she emitted that Cybertronian systems could detect. Botanica was perhaps the only bot who could have detected life on the surface, but she had seen no one. The Autobots were convinced the planet was empty of life.

Now they would be working towards creating a scanner to discover her – and perhaps Airachnid. The thought pleased her, but then she realized the problem. It would take a long time for a device to be built - considering that _everything_ took the Cybertronians a long time to do. It was a trait she would come to find frustrating.

Airachnid needed to be found now.

But perhaps, she could work the situation in her favor.

0/0/0/0/0

Killjoy patched up her wounds as best she could, until they had stopped leaking over her chest armor and down her back. She replaced the damage armor with Reverb's own, ignoring the slow pool of disgust growing in her stomach as she attached the mismatching armor. It took a clever use of her functioning arm to attach the metal to her back, bending it in a way that looked unnatural to a human and perhaps even to a Cybertronian. She dismissed those thoughts; She had other concerns at the moment.

From the overall carelessness of Neutrals and Autobots, she knew that they didn't know or didn't care that there might be a Decepticon presence on the planet. They only cared about Darklight, or whoever they thought the Decepticon spy was. It hardly mattered to Killjoy what they thought they knew, because she knew they were missing the obvious. No planet filled with energy was safe from either side, not while their war existed. Earth was in danger of being "sucked dry" by the very beings who would one day swear to protect it – if that possible future was going to happen at all.

The problem was that the Autobots needed the energy. Killjoy herself would need the energy when her energon supply ran out. Until she figured out where her own energon had originated from, she was stuck trying to find a substitute source. The cartoons made a huge deal about how energy would disrupt the balance of the world. However, Killjoy had never seen that as a problem.

She put the energy that could be taken from earth into two distinct categories – the first type of energy was that which could be taken out of the system but converted into another type of energy that could be used by the system, and the second type was energy already out of the system. Anything in the previous category should not be touched by anyone, but anything in the later category was fair game to those desperate for energy. Energy that could not be found naturally in the system should not be integrated into the system. After she thought the situation over in detail, she was ready to start writing down parables of Energy to ensure that the Autobots understood the rules and why they existed. Radioactivity was forbidden on Earth, while hydroelectric power, wind energy, and solar power were fair game for those desperate enough to use them.

She made a few mental notes to seek out Energon veins later, just in case Unicron was in the center of the Earth or Transformers: Energon was right to assume that pockets of energon in its raw form existed everywhere. She made note to make an investigation later.

She had abandoned any thought of aligning herself with the Autobots. They had Neutrals and spies to deal with and, by the time she could convince them of the Airachnid threat hanging over their heads, there would not be enough time to confront her and end her plans for good before damage could be done. Mostly, she didn't even want to try. A part of her wanted to protect the Autobots just as much as she wanted to protect the Autobots. In order to protect them, she had to prevent them from getting involved in the war while here on Earth.

That meant she had to find Airachnid's base and deal with the Decepticon herself, and she couldn't do that without first finding Darklight and figuring out how he was contacting Airachnid. For how could he set up a meeting between Reverb and Airachnid if he couldn't contact her?

After poking at her dressings and making sure they kept up the appearance of repairs, she headed back to the _Ark-One,_ turning on her phase shifter. The drab world was a welcome and familiar sight, but she was suddenly nervous, remembering the last time she had run around out of phase. Her spark felt fine except for the strange prickling sensation in her chassis, but that only made her rub her chest. Her tank felt unnatural. It was a feeling that would never go away.

If she lost control again, she'd lose her advantage and end up killing someone else again. One living femme, wounded, did not guarantee that the next one wouldn't die.

She steeled herself, mentally shaking those thoughts away. She couldn't back out now. Someone was going to die, whether she liked it or not. Reverb was an accident – the next one wouldn't die because it was an accident. The best she could hope for was a way to minimize the damage.

A cold ice suddenly filled her. Maybe it was the defense programming, alienating her from creatures it did not consider worth protecting, but she found it much easier than it should have been to dismiss all the concern for their safety. She shuddered, not wanting to know why or figure out but aware that her own curiosity and need to know everything would figure it out eventually, whether she wanted to do it now or not. All she could see was the future bloodbath that was about to happen and she wondered for an instant how many mecha she was going to kill who ended up in her way because of a simple mistake they made.

The prickling sensation in her chest only grew worse when she realized she couldn't bring herself to care, or even feel guilty. Reverb was dead. She had killed Reverb. And she was going to kill more. She could observe these facts with matter-of-fact detachment, and she felt only a small prickle of guilt, but only because she knew her mom and her sister wouldn't approve.

_I'm doing this for you. You wanted to protect the humans. I have to lay down the law now, or else these mechs are just going to walk all over our planet with no regard for its potential for life._

It didn't help quell the feeling inside and that made her frown, but she dismissed it. She had arrived.

Security was abuzz, the now drab colors of flashy paint jobs moving about made her pause. The hive of activity was intimidating, scary even, with so many unfamiliar shapes and objects moving about in a chaotic but oddly coordinated wave of activity. They moved with a purpose, cleaning off machines as they moved them up the ramp and into the ship's hold. Killjoy watched from a distance, invisible to the naked sensor thanks to her phase shifter, but still hidden amongst the olive drab trees as an extra precaution.

Red Alert, Vibes, Botanica and every other Autobot she might have recognized were nowhere to be found. Everyone was a Neutral. Once all the machines were aboard, most of the machinery she recognized from the platform, they stopped moving, all standing on top of the ramp and overlooking the clearing. Their gazes peered far over the trees towards the platform, and Killjoy found herself curiously looking in that direction, but she heard rather than saw what they were looking out for.

_Crrrrrrr—eaaaaaak._

Trees snapped, groaned, toppled, and crashed loudly just outside her field of vision, the ground shaking with the vibrations of one mighty tree falling right after the other. The world quaked and shuddered even in her out of phase reality, owing to the devastation being rot just beyond her field of vision. A tree's top brushed the edge of the clearing as it fell, scraping across the ground before finally coming to rest, then the first edge of the platform began to move into view riding on the fallen trunks. Killjoy could only watch in silent awe as it slowly pulled into the clearing, scrapped and beat up by the trees it had forced aside. Standing at the head of the party stood Darklight, pacing up a storm and clenching his fists as he kept glancing up over the rim of the platform at the sole occupant of the harvester. From the look on her face as she guided the platform in position, the unknown femme was equally displeased about the whole situation.

"That's far enough!" Darklight called out. "Allout will not want it to go any further. This is an optimum enough spot for us to continue harvesting so lets bring the equipment back on board and restart production." He gestured to the other femmes on top of the ramp. "Move out! Get that equipment back on board the Energy Platform and start pumping out more energy."

The femme on the platform dropped down beside him, her stance affronted. Her optics darted around at the destruction and the femmes. "She never agreed to this. What do you think will happen if she finds out?"

Darklight snorted. "I'm not afraid of that so-called Special Ops femme. She might be the Autobot's Third's bonded but that doesn't mean she can scare us into doing whatever she wants. She doesn't have control over everything we do on this planet. We are free from the war and free from being bossed around by _their_ soldiers."

"That's a pretty bold statement coming from you," she hissed, annoyed. "Besides, I wasn't referring to _that_ 'she'. Silvercross is in the repair bay because of what happened yesterday, you know."

Darklight grimaced, yellow optics flashing. "Yes, I know. I was there." He watched the femme descend off the platform and join him before he started leaving. Killjoy jumped forward, pausing as she realized she might have made a noise then chastised herself. She was invisible, silent, and untouchable. She caught up to the two easily.

"We can't be afraid of barbarians," he said. "We have to stand strong for our sakes, and make them see _reason_. Our resources are low and we need energy, in whatever form we can get it. If they disagree with our methods, then we must defend what is ours."

"I doubt the Autobots would agree with your methods," she muttered, cross. Their pedes steps clicked on the metal as they ascended the ramp. "It's almost Decepticon talk."

"But we are in the right here. We are desperate and starving – don't we deserve to live just as much as these natives do?"

"But it's their land."

"We aren't _going_ to take their land."

"And their energy."

"We won't take that much. Just enough to get by. We deserve to live, don't we?"

A nod.

The conversation continued on, but Killjoy had stopped listening to it. She cared very little about what they thought was right and wrong. They weren't considerate to the trees they had landed on and the trees their platform had crushed – so she, the only Terran on the planet, wasn't going to care or consider their feelings when it came to their need for energon. As the only native, what she said was law now. If they disagreed, then it didn't matter what they would do afterwards because their disobedience immediately made them a threat. If they left the planet, they were no longer a threat. If they were dead, they were no longer a threat.

She shuddered at her own thoughts, but the cold chill didn't go away – hadn't gone away since it first arrived. It was permanent, almost, a silent ruthlessness that watched and waited to kill. She wasn't sure if she could control it when the moment came for it to activate. It was terrifying.

The labyrinth inside of the ship suddenly seemed daunting. Of course, she could phase through the floor and escape out that way, but she didn't like the idea of having to escape at all. A part of her felt like she belonged here and thoughts of all the stories she had heard of the Autobots filled her mind. She shook herself, turning her attention to her target. She followed silently behind him, watching his every move, his every word. Everything seemed to scream Decepticon to her, from every oily word that passed his lips to every gesture he made with his face. He hated the Autobots, and he was tired, not physically but mentally drained. Every gesture he made was in frustration almost, like someone who wanted something to end.

That last thought caused a ping in her spark, and she froze in the hallway, thoughts frozen, but she did not break down into another spark-surge. A full breem passed before she relaxed, her doorwings fluttering behind her nervously, and when she looked around she discovered that Darklight had disappeared. _Gone to spread his words amongst the others_ , she mused. Her close call made her less interested in following Darklight deeper into the _Ark_ and she found herself wanting to leave, but she remained rooted to the spot. Her optics searched the hallways until they settled on a security camera, and she was more amused than surprised that it was trained directly on her, even though she was invisible.

Good old Red Alert.

Suddenly, it didn't matter if any Autobot she knew from her days as a Transfan didn't see her as a friend; she saw them as people to admire and protect, and that's all that mattered. She knew she had to speak to Red Alert, just to warn them of the coming Decepticon threat. It was what her sister would want, and it was the right thing to do. Then she would deal with the matter of Darklight, for far more personal reasons.

She walked towards the camera, stopped and frowned. Then she allowed herself to flicker into existence, watching in silence as the camera instantly trained on her. It was only a moment, and then she vanished again, but she never once moved from her position. Two Autobot guards came to check it out, annoyed when they spotted no one. Killjoy could only imagine Red Alert's insistence over the radio that yes someone was still very much there. The guards proceeded to check this out by waving their arms around, as if they could touch her person even though she was untouchable. They look ridiculous as they waved their arms around, and she could tell from their faces that they both were aware of and disapproved of this fact.

"There's no one here, Siren! Sir," snarled one, remembering last minute he was speaking to a superior.

Killjoy leaned curiously closer to the mech, but she couldn't hear anything that gave away any details on the obvious rant 'Siren' was giving the two soldiers. She _tsk_ ed and walked away, suddenly more amused than ever before. A thrill of excitement fluttered through her spark and she grinned, leaving the security mechs behind her as she phased through a wall. She sought out another empty hallway, another empty room, appearing and vanishing, watching the guards come and make fools of themselves. They couldn't _not_ answer the call because of the fact that Red Alert – this 'Siren' – was their superior.

But then there came a point when Red Alert stopped sending them. She appeared one moment then disappeared the next, waited for them to come, only to find no one coming. She braved appearing for a full breem, itching to pace back and forth up and down the hallways though she remained stationary. After that, she gave the camera a smirk and vanished for good. She started to truly explore the base then, popping into rooms and adding on to her mental map of the entire complex. Surprisingly, after running into the same room twice, she started getting a good idea on where everything was. She kept moving though, interested in finding all the most important places; the medical ward, the recreation room, the storage bay, and the security hub. That last one was her destination, but it never hurt to explore and find all the others first. She accidentally popped into someone's room once, and immediately back pedaled out when saw a femme's back bent over some strange crystal plant. She made sure to investigate into the plant later, not just out of curiosity but out of a impulsive instinct that told her it might be a threat to the planet.

She arrived at the security hub for the second time that day, and found Red Alert exactly where she expected him to be, hunched over the counsels trying to listen for her too soft pedesteps to where she was. He muttered to himself, pointing at digit at the camera, where she had been three seconds ago before she had phased through the wall. His mutterings turned into silence as he poked the screen, his face expressing just what dots had connected where in his helm. He whipped around, his gun out.

"Where are you?" he said, in that familiar reedy panicked voice, except it was feminine. "Show yourself!"

His optics roamed the room, passing over Killjoy twice before the he-femme began to panic. She chuckled to herself, a strange deep sound that sounded hollow in the small room. She frowned to herself, before abruptly appearing.

His reaction was instantaneous, his gun point swiveling around to target her. "Who are you?" he snapped, his audio horns flickering. "Are you a Decepticon?"

She paused, a memory of her reflection coming back to her. Her reddish-brown colored optics was off-putting, and she realized whatever she said should not contradict what he saw.

"I do not know," she said, finally, watching the confusion flicker over his face. She amended herself. "I do not know exactly what a 'Decepticon' is, so how am I to know if I am one?"

He paused, accepting that response with tenseness that belayed his suspicion. She almost cursed herself, but remained silent. She couldn't contradict herself. She had to appear as a logical constant, because otherwise they'd see her as dangerous and as wild as the planet itself. She had to appear the ignorant "barbarian" they had seen beforehand, someone who had just learned to speak Cybertronian and who did not know what difference factions in their war had, yet remain curious and reasonable.

"That would be a good point if I were to believe you have never heard or seen a Decepticon before."

She paused, thinking that over. "I may have seen a Decepticon, or heard of them in passing, but I have not ever known a Decepticon personally. Why are they Decepticons? Because of a specific way they talk and walk or because of a moral code or an oath they made?"

"They swear to restore Cybertron, no matter the costs."

"Ah, then I am not a Decepticon for I have never known a 'Cybertron', and I have never made any such oath."

He paused, digesting that. "Than you are a native?" She knew he was making connections to assumptions he already knew and she knew he already knew.

She relaxed, pleased. "Most certainly." She nodded. "It took a while to learn your language. I understand I may have confused your friends with my presence on my previous visit. You seem to think I was a… 'Autobot'? 'Praxian'? Not that I deny having ever heard of these before."

"You said you had heard of Decepticons in passing," he said, cutting straight to the quick. "When?"

"I also said I may have seen them," she pointed out, amused. "And I have. I have seen mechs who call themselves Decepticons. They do not like it here, so I am curious as to why they have stayed."

Red Alert's optics had gone huge. His mouth opened, his jaw worked, his lips moved, but no sound came out. "Here!?" he squeaked.

She winced, switching gears swiftly. This was one huge wave she had to ride, and no one rides a wave by going against physics. "I do not believe they are far, but they are not nearby either." She watched the mech growing more stressed as she stood there, his gun never once leaving her. "Does my presence bother you?"

He sputtered, realizing what she was looking at and slowly lowered his gun. "I have contacted my sub-commander. She will want to speak with you herself. She'll be here in a few astroseconds."

She shifted, her processor working fast. She quickly accessed everything she knew about Vibes, and plugged the information into her computer, watching the results play out. She felt her lip curl even before she had the plan fully printed out in her mind. Sneering in distaste, she finally gave him a response. The entire process took less than a fraction of a microsecond, the slight hesitation unnoticeable even by Cybertronians, and even if Red had noticed he could easily assume it was her translating his language and cultivating a response. There were advantages to being an unknown species. "I do not wish to speak with Vibes."

His optics narrowed, but he refrained from raising his gun, hand trembling. "Why not?" he asked, instantly suspicious.

"She is not wise."

Red Alert stared at her as if she had grown a second helm. "What?"

"She is not wise," she repeated simply, processor whirling to adjust the plan as she went, the same targeted result in mind. Warn the Autobots of the Decepticon presence. But then what? She shifted back to the conversation, allowing her processor to think on that. "You are wise. She is not."

Red Alert went from suspicious to shocked in less than a second. "What?"

She feigned confusion, inwardly concerned. "I do not understand…?"

He blinked at her, his face blank. "Why?" He paused, searching her face for understanding. "Why do you think I am wise?"

"Because you saw me when no one else did. You suggested that Decepticons existed while Vibes did not agree. You kept your suspicions even when Vibes had dismissed them. You are smart. You are wise." Planting a seed to use Red Alert for communication between Autobots and natives later. She was pleased with herself.

"That is paranoia, not wisdom," he defended.

"Wisdom is in the optic of the beholder," she began slowly, as if struggling with her words while her thoughts churned for a response, "when no true example of wisdom can be found and measured. You are wise, Red Alert."

Red Alert looked about ready to explode the moment she said his name, but he was silent. "Vibes is here," he said, his free servo posed over a button behind him. "Do not mention anything about what you heard in that conversation to anyone else. My _designation_ is _Siren_." Feminine lilt accentuated.

She frowned. "Siren," she repeated, disliking it. "Very well."

The door opened, admitting the familiar red femme, followed by Darklight. The moment she saw Darklight, Killjoy stiffened. Her doorwings registered Red Alert's glance between the two of them, but he probably thought the stiffness was for Vibes, not Darklight.

The presence of the black mech had sent her processor adjusting the plan again, this time with two different goals in mind. If she could get Darklight to contact Airachnid, she was one step closer to finding the mech. However, whatever she might say could push the Decepticons to making a move too soon. It was risky move, but she decided to poke the ants nest now. The Autobots had the advantage of Killjoy herself to help them fight off whatever threat Airachnid may possess. While they were outside defending themselves, Killjoy could sneak in and destroy the Decepticons from within. The plan had holes, certainly, but Killjoy was good at winging it when necessary and right now it was necessary.

"Ah, hello!" Vibes greeted with a charming smile that reminded Killjoy of Jazz. "I am Vibes, Commander of the Autobots on this planet. This is Darklight. What's your designation?"

She sounded nice, almost _too_ nice, like someone pretending to be kind to hide the evil soul underneath. Killjoy remained silent, her optics on Darklight, her faceplate expressionless. She let the room grow awkward before her optics darted towards Vibes' face. "There is no proper translation for my name into your language," she said, stiffly, her optics locking with Darklight's. "You may call me The Killjoy."

The dead silence that greeted that designation was almost palpable, and Killjoy suddenly remembered that Killjoy did not translate as 'Spoilsport' into Cybertronian, but something far more barbaric and sinister. Her processor adjusted the plan to the information. Luckily, the damage wasn't too severe.

Vibes frowned minutely before plastering an easy-going smile on her face. "Well, The Killer's Joy, it's a pleasure to make your acquaintance. Siren has told us that you know of the whereabouts of Decepticons on the planet. I would be interested-"

"Terresa," Killjoy said before she could stop herself. "This planet is my home world and we call it Terresa." The name was spoken in a derived form of English, a play on the word "Terra", though it meant little in Cybertronian. She hadn't clicked the word, which made it hard for normal Cybertronians to pronounce. Luckily, Vibes had extremely sharp audios and a good memory of sound.

"Terresa," Vibes said, smoothly. "We would be interested in knowing where these Decepticons are and what numbers they might have – any information you can give us."

Killjoy frowned, not willing to speak about information she did not have. Perhaps she needed to approach this from a different angle. "Why do you wish to know this information?"

Vibes shifted. "We have been at war with the Decepticons for many Stellar Cycles," the Sub-commander explained. "They seek energon in any form they can obtain it in and they do not particularly care for the repercussions."

"Like the Neutrals," Killjoy responded smoothly, optics locked on Darklight's, "who continue to use the Energy Platform after being told not to."

The red femme's mouth opened in surprise, her optics flickering backwards to Darklight who remained quiet, not giving away anything. Vibes looked uncertain, but kept up the appearance of being firm. "The Neutrals are not like the Decepticon. The Decepticons only seek to further their own ends."

"So does anyone who follows a cause," Killjoy pointed out, unimpressed. She was growing more smug and pleased with the situation, but forced herself to push the smugness and pleasure away so as not to reveal the game. She acted as if she wasn't smug or pleased at all, keeping herself serious. "I am not here to judge you or fight you on your beliefs. I am not even here to tell you to stop taking the energy from Terresa with your platform, though that will be dealt with in a matter of course. I am simply here to answer my own questions about why your Decepticons remain when they persist in their hatred of Terresa."

"They are not _our_ Decepticons," said Vibes. "We don't control them or command them. They seek out energy and that is perhaps why they remain on your planet. If you could tell us where they are, then we could remove them from your planet." She said it earnestly, but Killjoy had already expected such a response. She decided to put her foot down in this discussion, and utterly remove a few variables from the equation. Besides, the Autobots needed to focus on defense and they couldn't do that while planning an offensive strike against enemies they weren't even aware they had a few moments ago.

"No," she said, instantly. The momentary silence was not welcoming, and she continued to explain, words coming to her lips, calculated and intended to seek out a single ending. "To seek war on our planet is not permitted. We have already witnessed your capacity for wanton destruction and your inability to consider that anything beyond a metal creature is capable of being alive. To allow you to instigate war on this planet would most surely destroy the life We have worked so hard to create and protect here on this planet." She paused, then said in a quieter voice, her optics sympathetic and understanding. "Besides this, you are not in charge of operations here. You will leave the threat of the Decepticons to us, and you will not seek them out or instigate your war here. If you do, then you will suffer for disturbing the peace of this planet. If the Neutrals intend to wage their own private war against the Decepticons, then leave them to it. To protect them from Our Justice is to make all Autobots Our enemies. Do you understand?"

Vibes looked shocked and struggled to find words, finally settling on; "You do not understand how dangerous they are."

Killjoy's optics narrowed. "You should already know how dangerous _We_ are." She went silent, staring Vibes in the visor. "We are many. We are undetectable by most of your mecha and We are watching the Decepticon very carefully. We have yet to have any reason to attack them or view them as a threat, but We will attack you if you attack them."

Killjoy didn't dare look at Darklight. The only link she had to the Decepticons had to believe that she was watching the Decepticons, had to warn them of the 'many' who were watching them, so that she could follow him to wherever he needed to go to contact them and tell them both about the advantage they had and the disadvantage. Perhaps they'd even try to work this in their favor. It didn't matter as long as it made Darklight contact the Decepticons so she could find the location of the Decepticons.

"I was sent here to find answers and I have found them. I will leave you now. Do not interfere. These matters are no longer yours."

Before another awkward moment could descend upon them, Killjoy disappeared. They gave a start, but recovered quickly, having come to accept that as her ability. Darklight remained in his thoughts, an awkward silence filling the room.

"I-I should go and leave you to your discussion," said Darklight, his yellow optics dancing with something akin to panic. Vibes looked back at him, as if noticing him for the first time. "Good orn," he said, then immediately aimed for the door, with Killjoy followed right on his heels. It might take a while for him to get up the nerve to contact Airachnid, but Killjoy would be beside him until he did. Then, she would plot her next move.

In the absence of Darklight, Red Alert immediately turned to Vibes. "She's gone now."

"Now?" said Vibes, surprised. "What do you mean?"

"I mean," he said, dropping all pretenses of being female. "She left with Darklight. Vibes, we have a problem. She knows my name is Red Alert, which means she heard our discussion about the spy while we were outside. I'm positive those were her pedeprints. She _knows_."

Vibes was silent, recalling the whole conversation, and Killjoy's pointed look at Darklight. She probably hadn't realized she had made it, when she had said her title, but she had. "Keep an optic on Darklight. The moment that spy makes the first move, I want to know about it." She paused, before continuing. "I have a feeling this Killer's Joy is hiding something."


	9. Unexpected

Vibes announced her plans to leave Earth later that day, and Killjoy only heard about it from a conversation Darklight had with one of the Autobots.

It made sense. Because Vibes could no longer do anything about the Decepticon threat without risking the lives of her own Autobots and those under her charge, she therefore had to leave Earth in order to find another planet with an atmosphere that could hide their presence. At the same time, it prevented the local spy from communicating with his Decepticon allies.

But at the same time, it ruined Killjoy's plan to locate the Decepticons on the planet. Her quick and easy solution to an otherwise long term problem was backfiring spectacularly.

She wasn't the only one who didn't like the sudden change in plans.

Because Killjoy's little visit hadn't said anything about the energy the Autobots and Neutral's were strealing, Darklight had given the okay for the Neutrals to continue harvesting energy at optimum levels, which had put Allout in a much better mood and made Vibes frustrated every time she initiated conversations around getting her to stop. While someone was still going around and breaking the equipment, the high energy production levels allowed the neutral leaders to partake in the fruits of their labors, while Killjoy watched from the shadows.

The two leader's room was a suite-style apartment, with energon dispensers installed in the main room. The Ark had been originally designed to accept dignitaries with a extremely high living style back at the start of the war. The heavily armored transport vessel was retrofitted for space travel much later in the war and, though it wasn't the fastest thing in space, it could stand up against any heavily armed vessel long enough for it's commander to think fast and get them the heck out of dodge.

As a result of the fact that both were bonded, plus Darklight's preference for grandiose rooms and furniture, especially when it came to living with his big bonded, they both haggled and manipulated into owning the space instead of leaving it open for the science department. The whole science department got stuck in a slightly smaller area on the opposite side of the ship – which was a bonus. Allout never liked being anywhere near the science glitches, unless they had some nifty new machine that could transform the entire organic mess outside into energon.

"This is stupid," groused Allout, nursing her energon cube. "We've finally found a planet filled with enough energy to last us stellar cycles, with an atmosphere that protects us from passing Decepticon flag ships, and _now_ she wants to leave?"

Darklight frowned at his own cube, glowing light purple with a few cobalt-colored shiny blobs floating inside. "Perhaps she has found something out about this planet? Maybe there's something here she wants to keep a secret from us?"

"Huh, more like it has something to do with that Decepticon," the she-mech huffed. "Vibes hasn't been acting like she normally does since that she-mech arrived and had a spark surge on our ship." She took another sip of the energon, her brows furrowed. "She's fallen for that trick like the sucker of an Autobot she is. _Pathetic_."

Darklight's optics flickered, his processor turning. "Perhaps it has something to do with Reverb's disappearance."

"What? The Decepticon?"

"No, whatever it is that convinced her to leave," he paused, as if in thought. "Maybe that Decepticon wasn't alone. Perhaps there's an entire colony here, right underneath our olfactory sensors."

"Our sensors would have detected them," Allout stubbornly refuted. "Even an atmosphere like this one wouldn't hide so many spark signatures from space."

"Then why are we here?" The black mech paused to take a sip of his cube. "Perhaps the Decepticon and Vibes are in cahoots."

"Vibes would never stoop so low," Allout sneered. "She might believe that Decepticon we saw was an ancient lost colonial gone mad, but she would never join the Decepticons willingly."

"Willingly," Darklight echoed pointedly.

Allout grimaced at the thought. "She's Jazz's bonded. If there's anyone in the universe that could manipulate her to do something she doesn't want, it would be Jazz and no one else. They are wound so tightly around each other's digits that's impossible to pull those two apart. No, Vibes wouldn't make a deal with anyone if it meant hurting Jazz."

"You seem so sure of that," Darklight said, straightening from a slouch in his seat while his optics contemplated getting Allout to the berth. He grinned. "You are better at reading people than me."

Allout snorted mid-sip, his lips twitched. "I'm better at a lot of things."

"Really?" he said, absently.

"I know you are interested in a overload this dark cycle," said Allout.

"Can't slip anything past you," Darklight purred. "I have a buzz I've been wanting to get rid of and I don't think I'll have a nice enough defrag until its gone."

"You're not interested in a good recharge?" she asked, disappointed.

Darklight smirked. "I'd rather not go fully offline today. I have to deal with a few problems out on the Energy Platform later this orn."

"How long?"

"A few more joors at least."

"Plenty of time to have a quick romp!" Allout said, enthusiastically jumping out of her chair and settling on the berth. She patted the spot beside her. "Come join me!"

Darklight raised an optic ridge and grinned widely. "Can't argue with your logic!"

Killjoy stepped outside the moment things started to get heated. It was something about the talk and act of interface that made her squeamish, and she couldn't stomach standing inside the room while they talked. She was lost in thought when she found herself no longer alone in the hallway.

She was invisible to the naked optic, but every time she moved he picked up on it in the security hub. His sensitive audios picked up her pedesteps, even though it was a silent echo of her own heavy steps. Since it was fruitless to send down anyone else on base to investiagte the she-mech's position and since Red Alert would be heading down to the only doorway leading in and out of Darklight's and Allout's room, Red Alert saw it prudent to send himself down to investigate.

Red Alert stood in the middle of the hallway when Killjoy finally took notice of the silent Security Director. He didn't see her, but they both knew that he knew she was there. Killjoy sighed, unnerved at being alone but not alone at the same time. She was more of an outcast now than ever before because of her ability and it made her want to drop her phase shifter, now more than ever. She sighed, turning off the phase shifter.

"How do you keep finding me?" she asked. "The pedeprints outside I can understand. The sand is soft and pliable in many different dimensions. But here on your ship, you are still able to find me."

He was silent, not sure he should reveal his trump card to her just yet. She chuckled, pacing a ways away in silent thought before pacing back. Her pedesteps startled him, loud and heavy, so much different from what he heard on the vidscreen.

"Something wrong?" she asked, her door wings having registered the slight movement.

"Other than you invading our crew's privacy," he growled out.

"If I did that, then I would be in there watching them interface," she answered, annoyed. "And I'm not."

"But you _are_ on the ship uninvited. That's still an invasion of privacy."

"You are on my planet, _Siren,_ uninvited _,_ " she growled out. " _That_ is an invasion of privacy, by your logic."

Red Alert's servo transformed into a fist and he tapped it against his thigh in frustration. "That isn't the same. You can't own a planet."

"What do you call people who come to visit your world without authorization from your government?"

"Well, aliens. Illegal aliens."

"Exactly," she snapped. "You are an illegal alien on my planet, Siren. I own this world. You are not authorized to be here by my government."

"You said 'I own this world'," he said, suddenly. "What do you mean by that?"

Killjoy looked furious, though her expression fought to remain calm. "A slip of the tongue."

" 'Tong'?" Red Alert echoed, confused, mispronouncing the unfamiliar sound.

"Glossa," she corrected, irritated. She went silent, her audios and doorwings trained towards the mechs within that may or may not hear them. She was quieter when she spoke. "My mecha have the ability to wipe out whole armies with only one mech."

"You haven't answered the question," he growled.

"It's not a question needing answered," she responded, switching tracks. "Would you like them to hear us?"

His optics narrowed. "Fine," his voice was crisp.

The silence was punctuated by the sound of her doorwings twitching as she read the sounds coming from the otherside of the door. She sighed, looking at Red Alert with narrowed brown-red optics. "If you want the truth, you will have to have patience. My people are busy with the Decepticons right now, and don't have the thought processes left to speak with strangers who might turn out to be allies or foes."

The red and white mech shifted. "I will be looking forward to that."

"I don't doubt it."

Killjoy wanted to disappear, but resisted. "I do not wish to create tensions between our peoples. But I am afraid that current circumstances do not allow for us to consider peaceful operations with outsiders." Her optics narrowed. "We see no reason to consider such options."

"You know who Darklight is, right?" he pressed, his voice quiet.

"We know what he is, but not who he is," she responded. "We intend to find out the latter. It will be vital in the battle to come."

"You have no idea what you are getting yourself into," he hissed. "The Decepticons are treachorous."

"So is every creature that would lie to continue breathing," she told him. "This conversation is over and I would suggest you return to your station."

Red Alert fumed in silence and in a suddenly empty hallway, before turning and making his way back up to the security hub. Killjoy breathed a sigh of relief when he disappeared around the corner.

The fact that he could find her was a problem, and she knew it had something to do with his oversensitive sensors, mainly his audios. How he could find a soundless

It had never been her intention to end up speaking for a race that didn't exist, but now that she was here she found herself filling the role nicely. It was almost alarming, her strange overpowering desire to save the planet, and Killjoy wondered what might happen if they ever discovered the truth.

With the threat of leaving the energy rich planet hanging over their helms, the Neutrals were in no mood to hang around with the Autobots. Those that weren't working in the medbay spent most of their time off ship in silent protest, clamoring aboard the energy platform and helping increase the energy output. Allout was extremely pleased with the changes, and Vibes was finding it increasingly difficult to get everyone back under control. Vibes' lack of sharing information about the Decepticon presence only made the situation ten times worse.

Killjoy kept quiet and, once Darklight was out of his room, she was following him everywhere again. His first target after leaving his room was outside at the energy platform, where he and his neutral femme friend, Plasma, organized everyone into an efficiently working team. It was busier than Killjoy was used to, but she easily navigated through the busy mess, invisible, as she kept tabs on Darklight. Joors passed by slowly, dragging her down mentally. The sun had set and risen again, twice, before she realized her error.

Cybertronians worked on a different time system than Terrans, with one orn – or a Cybertronian day – lasting for almost two weeks, which meant that Darklight would be lying low for months maybe even years before he finally contacts Arachnid. That left Killjoy too much time to do nothing, and she was not a patient she-mech who wiled away the days by watching paint dry. With the threat of the Autobots and Neutrals leaving hanging over her helm, she found herself thinking about whether or not she should stay or leave.

Killjoy's logic was simple. The only thing preventing the Autobots from leaving the planet was whether or not Allout was willing to leave it. The Autobots were here to protect the Neutrals and they couldn't do that if they left without them, and Darklight would be counting on that. As long as the Autobots are on Earth, Darklight had a shot at manipulating them into the Decepticon's grasp. But at the same time, if the Autobots decided to derelict in their duty and left then the Neutrals would be in the Decepticon's hands.

Which would Darklight chose to screw over first? Neutrals or Autobots?

Darklight was a smart mech, and a skilled spy; he wouldn't act until either Vibes announced when she planned to leave or an opportunity arose to allow him to disappear, especially if he knew there was some heat on him. That was at least a week away from today, if not more. Killjoy decided she needed to pay Vibes and Allout a visit, just to see how the discussion was going about whether the Neutrals were leaving or staying. That would help determine when Darklight acted.

0/0/0/0/0

Vibes hated having to deal with self-proclaimed neutral leader, but that was part of her job. As security manager of colony _Ark-One_ , Sub-Commander Vibes was supposed to protect everyone onboard from any percieved Decepticon threat. Even when most of the neutrals now refused to board the ship beyond recharge and medical routine check-ups, Vibes knew that her duty still extended to protecting them.

"It's safer for all those involved to remain onboard _Ark-One_ ," she started, annoyed that Allout interrupted her but keeping herself calm.

"As if. The Decepticon intruder proved this."

"We have no evidence that it was a Decepticon," she said. "We have more reason to believe that it was an Autobot seeking help, something which we were unable to provide thanks to Darklight's and Silvercross' interference."

"Darklight and Silvercross were protecting my mecha, something which you didn't even try to do," Allout countered. "Darklight acted the best way he could. That she-mech was a berserker, ready to go on a rampage which would have devestated our forces if she had been allowed to continue to run rampant."

"She hadn't been running rampant when she appeared. Do not blow this situation out of proportion. Our main threat is what else has been hiding on this planet."

"We can't be sure the scans couldn't detect her. Our scans couldn't detect her when she disappeared. She could have been disappeared to wherever she goes while we were doing the scans above the atmosphere."

"That is conjecture, one that eliminates a possibility that could be hazardous to our health. We need to prepare ourselves for the worst possible scenario."

"Prepare ourselves for what, exactly? We're safe here. There's no reason to worry about anything. So, save your doomsday talk for Optimus Prime. I'm going out and getting me some energon."

Vibes sighed as the blast doors closed on Allout's heels, her large audio fins lowering as her mood plummeted. Her job was becoming more complicated by the day and she found herself wishing for the good old days when she was just aboard her ship in space, not worrying about loose cannons or possible native hostility.

A blip on her comm systems alerted her to Siren's communication request and she sighed as she accepted the call. ::Please tell me you have some good news.::

The he-femme was quiet for a moment. ::Define good news?::

She sighed again, pressing her digits against her forehelm. ::What is it?::

::The Killer's Joy has stopped following Darklight around.:: he began. ::I'm not sure what her intention is.::

::Really? That was only eight joors.:: She paused, wondering if The Killer's Joy had gotten new orders or was being mobilized to attack the Decepticons. ::Keep tabs on them both.::

::Already being done. Siren out.::

Vibes sighed, adding this mystery to the list as she stood up and headed for her chambers.

0/0/0/0/0

It didn't take a genius for Killjoy to realize that she had missed whatever lovely conversation Vibes and Allout had taken part in. She walked through Allout as the neutral leader headed back to her room or wherever she went when she felt triumphant. The big she-mech didn't interest Killjoy at all – she didn't like the female and her blind adolation of a traitor, who she was stupid enough to bond with. The whole situation reminded her mother's stories of her first husband, who Windcatcher had married even though she hadn't felt right around him. She should have listened to her first instincts – he had used her as a security blanket when his nightly flings didn't turn out so well.

She hadn't thought of her family in a while, and her thoughts turned to her father, Maelstrom. He was the gentlest giant and smartest mech Killjoy had ever had the priviledge to meet, and a very lucky catch for her mother. It felt strange thinking of them as if they were Cybertronians, when she knew them as being human. Her thoughts turned outwards, and she wondered for a moment if humans were even on the planet – was she somewhere in the distant future or somewhere in the far-flung past?

Shaking those thoughts away, Killjoy returned her thoughts towards the present, retracing Allout's steps back towards where she hoped was their meeting room. A door opened behind her and she felt a famliar spark signature as Vibes emerged from the meeting room and headed down the hallway. The black and white mech followed slowly on her heels.

The Sub-Commander and her shadow paused in the hallway when a comm. link interrupted her thoughts, before she continued to her office. Killjoy didn't put much thought into figuring out who commed her, deciding that she had enough trying to figure out mysteries for one vorn and just wanted to go back to her cave and defrag.

But she had priorities and she felt responsible for leaving the Autobots in, what they saw, as an unknown and dangerous situation – one made more dangerous by Killjoy's involvement and her inability to cooperate on revealing too much information. She didn't expect herself to be gone for longer than a week – half an day in their time – but to them it could mean the difference between life and death if Darklight moved too early. Killjoy was really starting to regret her rash decision to speak to the Autobots in the first place; it would have been best if she hadn't tried to single-handedly deal with the Decepticon presence. There were too many unknowns, and it was difficult to admit that Vibes might have been right on some small account. Killjoy didn't know anything about how to deal with this kind of situation and had no experience of matters of war.

Funny, how only now did she realize this, when the weight of her decisions were on the verge of causing a skirmish, one which might end the Autobots once and for all. She shifted uncertainly as she settled into a chair opposite of Vibes, shifted the seat so that it was affected even though she was weightless in it.

Vibes looked up at the chair, her gaze focused solely on where she thought the she-mech's optics were. "Yes?"

Killjoy gave a soft sigh as she rippled into appearance. "I have been called away," she said. "It seems that my time off has come to an end."

"'Time off'?" she asked, feigning confusion. "I thought that your presence here was a permanent occupation."

"No, it never was," she corrected. "I was sent to see if Darklight would move in time to save the Decepticons. He has not, and now I am called away on other matters."

"The Decepticons are defeated?" she asked, surprised.

"No, but it is too late to save them from their fates. We merely wish to know when Darklight moves out to speak with them, and your predictions on when that might happen."

"Why? So you can assassinate him before he gets there?" Vibes asked. "I know how special ops are run and I won't let you do that to a possible Decepticons spy. He will need to be interrogated when and if your suspicions are confirmed."

Killjoy paused, not expecting this response. "You speak as if you do not suspect him yourself."

"We had no reason to suspect him and still have no reason to suspect him before you came on board," she said.

"Then I am confused. Was it not your Security Director who said that there was a Decepticon spy on board? Is there not someone out there destroying your energy platform equipment?"

"A mystery we intend to investigate more into," she said, "But the Decepticon spy was a figment of our Security Director's imagination."

Killjoy's optics narrowed. "Do not discredit your Security Director. He was right about me and he was right about this spy. Your refusal to believe him is unwise, and I would suggest you rectify your mistake soon or you could risk the life of everyone where on this ship." She sighed. "Are you familiar with a mech, different greys in color, with blue optics?"

"Why, yes," she said.

Killjoy's optics remained narrow. "He was an innocent mech, wrongly accused and easily corrupted thanks to his past history. He had no previously established relations with the Decepticons before his arrival to Earth."

"And how would you know that?" she asked, annoyed.

"Because, _we_ interrogatedhim before his rather untimely demise." Killjoy had her digits spliced, appearing very serious. "He was going to meet up with Arachnid. We captured him before he could make the rendezvous with the Decepticons. He told us about you and he told us about the mech who sent him out there to meet with the Decepticons."

"Then he has to be lying," Vibes assured her. "Our sources would have detected the spy before we even left our homeworld."

She wanted to snarl, " _A deep processor scan does not lie, especially when the mech being scanned has no consciousness left to defend himself with_ " but she refrained. Admitting such a thing would alienate her from the Autobots, perhaps permanently. It was an invasion of privacy far deeper than a simple unexpected planetary visit, twisted up because the scan was done after death, even if it was necessary.

 _You wouldn't have this problem if you were prepared for war_ , she thought, aware that even a low level Autobot grunt probably wouldn't have qualms about probbing a dead Decepticon's processor.

 _But you aren't an Autobot,_ said a voice in her head _, and you are certainly not a soldier._

 _All the more reason to get back to the Mentor_ , she told herself.

"If you believe that, then you are bigger fool than we imagined. Our people have ways of extracting that information and detecting whether or not he is lying." She had stood up, depositing a datachip, before she gave the she-femme a bow. "Now, if you will excuse me, I have to go. Have a good orn."

She disappeared before the red Sub-Commander could give a response and she dropped through the floor, disappearing into the forest without a glance back.


	10. Forgetting

It was a gamble and she knew it.

Even as she made her way down the tunnels towards the half-buried ship, her mind search for another option, but it was pointless. The only thing she was good at was manipulation simply because she had so much experience at it. Besides if she started telling the truth now, who would even believe her? Sure, she hadn't yet told a lie to The Mentor, but she was starting think she ought to. Out of everyone she's spoken to, he was the one who deserved to be lied to.

On the other servo, Killjoy knew from experience that large complicated lies like this usually became too messed up for even herself to discern the truth. It wasn't like she could stop now, though. If she told the truth, it would get the Autobots to question everything she'd ever told them and they'd perhaps not be so quick to act when she finally got around to telling them to do something that might save their lives.

Killjoy had been thinking about this too much. Her entire childhood was spent thinking of all the various ways her sister might die if she wasn't there to stop it. If her sister had been truly accident prone, every possible accident that might have happened probably would have dove her paranoia to Red Alert proportions and sent her on a one way ticket to locking her own sister in a tower and forcing her to adopt the basic plot of Rapunzel. But Killjoy had enough foresight to realize that doing anything like that would smother her sister, and she didn't want to be the one to burst her sister's bubble when it came to doing things. Her sister was a genius and even as a kid Killjoy hadn't wanted to smother that intelligence. It was downright cruel.

Standing at the mouth of the underground-plus-underwater ship's entrance, Killjoy found herself reviewing her decisions up to that point, a small part of her vainly hoping that doing so might redirect her stubborn drive elsewhere. Since she didn't think it would hurt to be careful, she back up and thought it over.

Should she even care about Airachnid? The problems of mecha from other planets had never been on her list of things to do before. Then again, she had never before been in this situation before. She had spent two whole vorns as a Cybertronian and never once got involved in a situation with alien life forms – and they were aliens because she was currently the only native Cybertronian of the bunch. Whatever past she had has a human or whatever she had been, she was Cybertronian here and now. This planet was hers. These mecha didn't belong here.

Somewhere along the lines, in the middle of all her lies and deception, Airachnid had become her responsibility. She had taken the choice out of the Autobot's hands, and now she was dealing with the consequences with so much on her plate. Sure, the Autobots might be able to figure out she was lying, or one of them might even have a lie detector plugged into them somewhere. It didn't matter. Airachnid was her responsibility now, and therefore she had an obligation to find and destroy the menace before her possible techno-organic highness decided to cyberform Earth or something. She couldn't stop going after Airachnid if she tried.

Which left with her two additional problems. Sub-Commander Vibes would most likely have already figure out her comm. link number and might even know exactly where she was through it. Forget the fact that Killjoy had only given it to her so she could learn about the whereabouts of the Decepticons if Darklight contacted them while she was gone. On the other servo, Darklight had no idea where she was and was (most likely) laying low until he could get the opportunity to contact Airachnid – an operation which could very well last for _vorns_ , and by then Killjoy would have gotten impatient enough to have started a search for Airachnid on her own. That is, if Vibes didn't order the Autobots and Neutrals off planet and leave her in peace first.

For some reason, the thought of them leaving left her far more unsettled than the idea of them staying, and Killjoy guessed it had something to do with her impromptu promise to protect Vibes, just before her spark surged. How could she manage that if Vibes left the planet? Killjoy could go after her, but then that would leave many more questions unanswered – and Killjoy wanted to find answers.

One of them waited beyond the door of the crashed ship. He could probably see her, whether or not she was using her phase shifter. She had a sneaking suspicion that The Mentor wasn't called The Mentor without first being designed to teach someone – and how good could a teacher be if he couldn't even find his student? Then there was the problem of her pieces of armor she had left behind. Were they even worth retrieving? And then there was the problem of repairing the damage underneath the armor. Could she use the ship's medbay without being picked up and hogtied by The Mentor?

Her problems always came back to the Mentor. Even if Vibes left the planet with Airachnid, or Killjoy found and killed Airachnid, the Mentor would still be here, keeping his secrets. It was unsettling that he knew her so well, perking her curiosity to trick her into returning.

 _But I'm not here because of him_ , she reminded herself. She was here to repair her support struts and wiring and get some real battle training in before getting back to her Darklight problem. The Mentor's lessons be slagged.

Killjoy felt the familiar comforting presence of her phase shifter wrap around her. She started forward, moving slowly and checking every which way for the presence of the Mentor, her doorwings twitching as they worked overtime to detect the holomech.

She passed through the corriders, one by one, but the Mentor was no where to be found. She didn't relax, her tanks shifting painfully in her stress. He could be _anywhere_ , and she had _no idea_ where. A part of her almost wished he would appear before her, because then she would know where he was. She hated not knowing.

She arrived in the observation deck unchallenged, and the familiar sight of blue waters made her relax, but she tensed again as she looked over the controls. The diary entry hadn't appeared on screen for whatever reason – which she was grateful for – and she wondered how deep she could dig her arms into the many different files onboard before she found something of promise. She had searched through it hundreds of times and couldn't remember a single moment where a clue of her so-called Decepticon creator had turned up. It might be a fruitless endeavor.

 _But the last few times, I hadn't been looking._ It was the only reason she found compelling enough to disregard her earlier assumptions and take a deeper look into the main database just one more time. She glanced around for any signs of The Mentor, then dropped her phase shifter, turned her doorwing sensors up to max and plunged her transformed hand into the nearest port. The direct download – something she picked up while rifling through Reverb's cortex – was much faster than manual and it began looking up every single word she could think of that might relate to her creator all at the same time. Cross-references were quickly logged away and download with the speed of a super computer, while her sub-routines worked doubly hard going through her doorwing data at equal speeds, looking for the holomech or any other movement that signaled an enemy was nearby.

* * *

If one imagined the internet like a labrynth of a library that carefully categorized each book by common research topics, then you would essentailly have imagined what The Killjoy was seeing in that exact moment. Pulling out one book-file about the length of Lord of the Rings and glossing over it for the right words took less than a nanoklik, doing the same to thousands more books took less than an astrosecond, for one million - approximately one klik, and so on. Any one database had over one million Lord of the Rings sized book files, which took more than a few breems to properly sort through.

Her mission was a vain attempt from the get go, but The Mentor was feeling extra humorous that day and decided to give her approimately 5 breems to play around before he pulled the plug. He was a digital wall in the computer database, unable to plug into or interact with any of the data on the other side of the wall, be it database or people, but he could certainly moniter and register when a new lifeform entered his digital domain. It would have been spectacular to see his pupil flounder uselessly for a few breif moments before he decided to take her new found toys away and put her back on another punishment detail. Except, when the process began, The Mentor registered not one, but _two_ , intelligent lifeforms hacking into his database at the same time, one downloading a stream of data and the other uploading it. It was a baffling situation made all the more puzzling by the sudden appearance of familiar sophisticated programming firewalls, not unlike firewalls he had encountered before, on the student's first attempt to hack into the system around two vorns ago. She had been utterly successful in the attack and had learned something even his own A.I. wasn't privy to. He had thought she was extremely mature and intelligent to have been able to do it.

The presence of these two separate intelligences hacking into his database at the same time was _extremely_ baffling, especially when one was obviously the presence which had hacked him two vorns ago and the other was most definitely not and most definitely the efforts of his student. Though both were extremely mature and intelligent to be able to hack his systems, the more sophisticated program was doing a much better job at it. It had already shut down his motor functions, most of his mechanical attachments and even his main processing power core, which prevented him from retaliating. All he could do now was record, which was tampered with by the presence of the much more sophisticated program. In seconds, The Mentor's entire program had been rendered inert, helpless, and only one virus initiation away from being deleted. The alien program which was obviously not his student recognize the threat had been neutralized and returned its attention to uploading the whole package. His student remained both oblivious and confused.

This had been what had separated Rhythm from all other Conversions. Not only her unique and twisted outlook on life, but also the presence of this sophisticated program that seemed to originate from Rhythm herself. It did not come from some outside source, but seemed to come from a detached extention of Rhythm that she wasn't even aware of. What it did after The Mentor had been effectively paralyzed was beyond him, but judging from the enlightment Rhythm reached at the end of the first download – a download of data which he could not decipher but could effectively delete since it was so alien to his own programs that it stood out – The Mentor could only guess that this foreign program, not unlike a human's poor memory bank, was rewritting her past. It was a strange concept to grasp considering that Rhythm had no memory of ever encountering the program before The Mentor had started converting her and Rhythm's memories at the time had already been magnanimously altered from the typical cockasian female.

The Mentor didn't have the mental fascilities to imagine any other possible explanation. He saw only the evidence before him, and everything he hadn't yet encountered just didn't exist yet. That was how it worked. His long expansive memory banks expanded back centuries, millenium, even thousands of stellar cycles, all the way back to the ages of the Thirteen and never before had he encountered a program quite like this. It was certainly ancient – far more ancient than even he. It was powerful and efficient in execution and if the Mentor was capable of emotions such as Love he might have just been kissed by Cupid's arrow. But such fanciful fairy tales were not in the Mentor's job description. He had before him a very serious issue; a possible corrupted Convertion.

They were rare and usually happened outside of his area of control, often with the very program that caused the corruption deleting the very file that would have allowed The Mentor to contact the individual and upload the sufficient program that would have corrected the issue. He decided that a deeper delve into Rhythm's datapacks would reveal the problem to him, but he would have to do that after he was released from his digital bounds. He was patient.

* * *

Killjoy _knew too much_.

It was like someone had taken a ballon and put it in her brain and slowly filled the balloon with water until it felt like her skull would explode from the pressure. She knew too much. Both literally and figuratively. She understood sciences and physics that she knew for a fact humans had not yet even discovered – _spacebridge technology_ was suddenly there, at her digit-tips, ready and waiting for her to transform into a blueprint and build. It was alarmingly simple and yet sophisticatedly beautiful, all at the same time. But science wasn't the only knowledge that suddenly had come to her digit-tips. Philosophy and psychology seemed to suddenly come to light. The alarming similarities between Cybertronian and human psychology was so vast that Killjoy couldn't help but link the similarities. It created pathways in her mind, locking the knowledge permanently in her memory.

But just as the vast amount of knowledge – arts, language, archetecture, computers – arranged itself so suddenly, it just as suddenly began to disappear. Before her in a pattern she recognized as reality, it started to slip away again and fold back up and disappear all at once, leaving her processor throbbing with the sudden influx and outflux of information. If she had a skull, she was sure it would have been cracked. What was physics again? Ah yes, gravity, projectile motion, force, energy... the spacebridge technology was nowhere to be found, gone back to where it had come from. Her human past suddenly seemed more real than the digital attack that had just assaulted her, and the only thing that told her it had happened was not the exponential memory files in her data banks but the surplus of knowledge coming from her language, psychology and philosphy files. Everything she had instantly recognized and absorbed, creating new pathways for, had remained behind, a permanent mark of the mental attack. Nothing else had found anywhere to stick, and so like the tide upon the shore it had disappeared back into the rolling waves.

It was eerily similar to something that had happened once before. It was a long time ago – two vorns, as her mind so helpfully reminded her – and she remembered that she actually didn't remember all the details of that time either. She couldn't even remember the painful throbbing the attacked would have surely left behind. The only thing she had remembered that day was the message she had received from someone claiming to have made her using someone else's methods, which he looked down upon. The impression the information which had momentarily left upon her mind was already fading, so she couldn't ask this well-spring of knowledge what exactly was the method he had used.

 _How did I forget this?_ she wondered, pulling herself away from the console and looking around. The world looked strangely different, unreal, like a simulation. She recalled one other instance when she had thought something was a simulation back she had thought she had been missing something after she got hit by the car crash. She had thought the simulation was her human past, but now she realized the truth. But now that the memory of the attack was starting to fade, the truth was starting to slip away with it. She was going to forget this, again, until the day she started looking into it once more. And she knew for a fact that she probably wouldn't survive until then. She needed a plan. Something that would make her _wake up_. Something that would make her realize that _this_ wasn't real. It was a dream. She was in a hospital bed, somewhere back home, and she needed to get back there. Somehow.

The last attack had left behind a clue. Her creator's message. It was the first clue that something had gone wrong. A Secret she was supposed to know but couldn't remember. Perhaps a meeting with Primus that she had forced herself to forget? But no, the message had specifically been about restoring Primus, as if he were some other being. Perhaps it was someone else who had written the message.

She was already starting to slip away into forgetfulness. She needed something in the simulation to tip her off and she only had a few moments left to rig it.

* * *

The Mentor came back to the land of the living rather suddenly.

If not for his perfect databanks, he might have gone on, business as usual with no clue as to what had happened. But fortunately for him there was evidence and evidence meant that Something was Amiss, and Something Amiss meant there was Something Needing Fixing.

The first order of business was to double check his databanks for similar cases in the past. Glitches were often filed away and referenced in a folder, so that his self-repair programs would have an easy method for checking for viruses or false information. Outside of his normal virus scans, The Mentor had a habit of double checking those references. The more often he did it, the more likely he was to catch a glitch or virus before it ravaged his systems. Fortunately, the only one he had listed in files dated back to two months ago, when the Student had just 'woken up'.

The check was always absolute, but long. It usually happened when the individual was in deep recharge, when it was easier to check those references without annoying defense programs getting in the way. It was impossible to do while she was awake, and that meant he had to force her into a shut down – an event that _had_ to have some in-simulation explanation or else risking the whole illusion shattering. Already her newly formed battle computer was slowly taking his simulation apart, guided by her personal desire to fully understand the world.

He wasn't unfamiliar with battle computers developing in the brain center. It acted as a substitute subconsciousness, providing a constant background noise the human brain had associated with regular white noise. Without it, like many before her, the Student was likely to become irrational or simply cease functioning. Anything that could harm the Student must be avoided, so the development of the battle computer was not prevented. It became necessary to suppress it, and the defense program quickly took over. The combined effort of both from two different angles was wearisome, but he had forestalled it from doing irreparable damage to his simulation. He would hate to have to start a new one.

This one already had glitches. He couldn't trace it back to an immediate source, but he suspected the culprit was her. The main glitch acted much as a virus, nothing more than a nuisance really. It froze the program for a few seconds too long. That was it. Nothing else was out of the ordinary. It could be easily patched up.

However, it did little to alleviate his worries. This wasn't the first time his program had glitched. Someone kept meddling with it while he wasn't looking, leaving no trail behind for him to track. It made little to no sense. A hacker would have left a trail for him to follow, allowing him to identify it's last known location and prevent anyone else from doing the same thing. This attack seems to have originated from within, but that was impossible. His simulation was flawless and he wouldn't attack himself like this. He couldn't. Which left only one last variable.

But she wasn't in any position to attack his programs like this. She had no past experiences with programming beyond watching her sister and parental unit doing it.

So, who?

It was a mind boggling situation, one that demanded he push aside protocol and check his references, even while she was awake. It would leave behind a helmache, but it would satisfy his immediate concerns.

Except when the investigation finally went underway, he found no prior indication of a glitch in his databanks. Not even the first reference was there. But he remembered there being one, which left him confused. Perhaps there was a flaw with his databanks? He activated his internal virus scanner and directed it to search his databanks for any indication of viruses. He waited, letting his processors muse over the conundrum.

Regardless of the facts, the situation pointed to the culprit being Rhythm, aka Killjoy. She had an insatiable curiosity, and a desire to help people. The latter had been programmed into the simulation, allowing Rhythm to fulfill her programming. If not for a few expected but unpredictable variables, it would have worked.

Punishment would be dealt out soon. Before he could do that, however, he had a few programs within himself to deal with. He was an old machine. An original creation of Primus, and a few of his programs floated around, preventing him from doing certain things. But he had many years of practice dancing around them. It was the creator who had programmed him to love.

He loved his Students, his job as their caretaker and mentor, and he loved his simulations. He loved the day he had come up with them. It was a controlled environment, one which his Students could live in forever in comfort, fulfilling their desires. It was incentive to keep them trapped.

He had known in the creation of his simulation that Rhythm, aka Killjoy, was overly curious when it came to interfacing. He had misunderstood before, when approaching her with the temptation. It had almost screwed things up, and he was barely able to put the pieces back together. He had created a divide that was going to cause problems in the future.

But he did not like Rhythm messing with the system. She was meddling in something that could both damage her mind and his own mind, perhaps even his ability to acquire new hold over other mental minds. She was meddling in things she could not possibly understand.

The Five Lesson system was somewhat new in creation, designed to simulate a step-by-step process of these 'transfans' becoming Transformers. If he had any appreciation for the irony, he would be amused.

But he hated the fact that she kept meddling. If she had left well enough alone, he would never have gotten metaphysically involved with rewriting the program. It was difficult to do. The more the simulation changed, rewritten, most likely by Rhythm, the more he was having difficulty remembering what the original simulation was all about. Something was glitching up his systems, but he had yet to find the virus.

He had no choice, not really. In order to protect himself and his programming, he would have to tip his servo the only way he was currently able to, without throwing her off. He had to move up his time table.

Lesson 4 must begin.


	11. Lesson 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Mentor begins Lesson 4 and Killjoy faces her toughest opponents yet.

_A note to my younglings, when you find this journal entry – I apologize for deceiving you. It is natural for my kind to do that, unfortunately, and I detest the fact that I had to degrade myself to their methods in order to create you. He has to be stopped and this was the only way to do it._

_My designation means nothing in your language and it has never meant anything in any of your languages since all the times you have spent making languages. Since you are still learning to understand even the most basic of Cybertronian languages (and admittedly some of your are much better at it than others, to our astonishment) I cannot tell you my name in my native tongue. For now, know me as Atlas, though some of you might know me better in the legends you are about to learn as 'The Original Killjoy'._

_You must protect The Secret. You must not allow for anyone to know about it, in case it gets discovered by him. He will use it poorly, in every way it is_ not _supposed to be used, and he will destroy it, and that would destroy any chance we have of restoring Primus to His Golden Self._

_Of course, naturally you have little to no idea as to what I mean. I don't know how much of my message gets through, and I am fully aware that sometimes almost none of it does. Certain pieces get lost in translation when I first send it out – this I know for sure. But that doesn't make my message any less important. If you value importance, then you will easily grasp the gravity of my message and most of the important bits will stick. If you do not value any form of importance, then you might very well be already lost. You cannot help being what you are and I wish I knew someone to send for you, to awaken you from this nightmarish sleep you will succumb to._

_I know you will be confused, my younglings. I know you will not understand and might never understand why I had to do what I did, but I leave my mission in your servos anyway. It is imperative that you tell no one of this. No one. Not even the Prime. If any word of the Secret reaches him then our cause is lost._

_Its greatest protection is absolute secrecy, and this is why I can never directly tell you its name. Its name isn't even truly it's name – it was a name dubbed onto it over the years after it constantly was confused with our 'Heaven', so to speak. The relationship between them is not important right now. I hope I will be able to explain this to you later. If you can figure out how to get out._

_Please, my daughters, protect this_ _Secret and all information surrounding it with your_ life _._

* * *

The _Original_ Killjoy.

It made sense, in its own twisted way. If she was Killjoy, then this guy had to be a previous Killjoy. But how it had known about her becoming The Killjoy didn't make any sense. It never explained that little detail and Killjoy was wanting to know more.

She recalled downloading the text before, how much shorter it had been then, and how she had felt that she had forgotten something after downloading it. She felt lost without those memories, now and then. It had caused her to wander around for fifty years, lost in the midst of timeless memories and forgotten dreams. She had distracted herself then with little odd-jobs here and there, but she didn't have the luxury of being distracted. She was standing in the midst of enemy territory and she needed to be sharp and alert.

She realized after a moment that something was amiss. The sound of her pedesteps didn't sound hollow, like she was standing in a square box of room instead of the observation deck - like it always sounded when she was out of phase. It sounded startlingly normal. She checked her systems in hopes that it was a glitch in her audios, but discovered that it was in fact not. A familiar screen had appeared in her HUB which she had ignored up until that moment. Her phase shifter was rebooting and it was alarmingly slower than it had been when she was on board the _Ark-One_. And she didn't think for a moment that it hadn't been tampered with.

"Mentor!" she called. "What have you done to me?"

If not for the alertness sweeping in her body and spark, she wouldn't have noticed the slight tingling sensation sweeping unbidden across her frame. Perhaps it had been scanning her for years and she'd never notice if not for the overwhelming sense of being in enemy territory. The uncomfortable thought sent a cold shiver up her spinal strut and she stared silently up at the ceiling.

She had always thought that The Mentor had been dormant until she had busted a hole in the side of the ship. It made sense that something like an intruder would cause it to wake up. But if it had been awake prior than why did it awaken only upon her return? Why did it not recognize her as an intruder and rather saw her as a pupil? Her cortex throbbed, reminding her of the computer interface she had been forced to disconnect from just moments earlier and her subsequent memory loss. It was extremely terrifying thinking about her memory loss, and she was afraid that there might be something out there she was hiding from herself. The Secret that would restore Primus to his Golden Self came to mind.

"Mentor?" she asked, wary.

"These specs are not in my databanks," it said, with a long pause that made her squirm. "Your systems must be adapting to the alien atmosphere."

"Come again?"

"Your weapon systems have been offline for a time," it said by way of explanation. "They came online again when you came back from your earlier escape." By earlier, it meant a lifetime ago.

"Weapon systems?" she queried, searching her databanks for records of any weapons systems but none appeared.

"Yes," it said. "Curious how you'd figure out how to use the phase shifter first." That last statement was mostly for himself, she was sure. It didn't sound like it was even speaking to her. She was just privy to his thoughts. It was very un-A.I. like, especially one that had been asleep for the first vorn she had been awake. And why would it refer to _that_ incident only compounded how un-A.I. like it was.

"Why did you do it?" she asked.

"For the sake of a lesson," it said, matter-of-factly and a little coldly.

"Lesson 1?" she asked. "Or Lesson 2?"

"Neither and both," it said, taking pleasure from her confusion. It was almost smug.

She scolded. Answers where inside that thing's head and she wanted to find them, as well as turn the holomech's advanced computer intelligence to mush. She told herself it was to prevent others who might stubble upon the ship from getting damaged by it's rather twisted nature, but she admitted to herself that it might not be the only reason. She _had_ sworn to make sure that no one took pleasure in anyone else's pain and it was the one she had sworn that oath for.

"It doesn't make sense for someone of your personality to so easily cave in to the pontificating of a heroic fool," it continued. "I was expecting better of this."

"Better than what?"

"You are mature, young and strong. You are not like your sisters, or Optimus Prime. Why do you choose to follow their preachings?"

Of course, it occurred to Killjoy that he might have read her mind while she in the interface. How many secrets he had gleamed from her mind were entirely impossible to discern. She wondered if the Original Killjoy's Secret was one of them. She shivered, silently promising herself to not try and fight The Mentor on his own ground again and avoid the interfacial option until The Mentor was safely neutralized.

"I can understand my sisters," she began slowly. "But Optimus Prime? I think you have me confused with someone else."

It was quite for a moment. "Hm."

"Hm what?"

"That would be the first time you haven't lied in a while."

The Killjoy remained quiet on that, adding _knowing everything about Vibes and the others_ to the list of things that the holomech now knew about.

"It makes one wonder _what else_ you might be hiding."

She didn't frown and almost didn't breathe as her mind whirled to respond. "You mean you don't know?" she partially teased, keeping her surprise hidden beneath a warm and relaxed mask. "You were in my head, were you not? Wouldn't you know that?"

The silence was its own answer and she fought back a smirk, relief flooded through her as she realized that The Secret was still safe, however long that would last.

"So its confirmed that you _have_ completed Lessons 2," it half growled. The emotion caught her by surprise, but then she realized that she honestly shouldn't be surprised about anything anymore.

"What makes you think that I hadn't completed this lessons before I woke up?"

It gave a long suffering sigh. "I don't like the universe choosing when you must learn a lesson."

"You said something similar earlier," she recalled. "But what if the universe teaches the lesson better?"

It fumed. "The universe is a chaotic entity with no mind or purpose of its own. It cannot teach valuable lessons necessary for your development."

"And yet last time I was here you called me 'more mature than you were expecting'."

"Physical maturity has none of the same connotations as a knowledge based capacity."

" _Physical maturity_?" she said with incredulous disgust. "Sounds like a justification for rape and murder to me."

The dead silence which answered her made the room stiff with some unseen cold.

"Do not mistake me for a regular mech," it said, angry. Yes, angry.

"Then stop acting like one," she said.

The banter had gone on long enough for her phase shifter to get up to 32 percent, but the moment she checked it The Mentor caught wind of her scheme.

"You dare!?" it growled. "You dare waste my _valuable_ time on this stupid, _pointless_ conversation?"

She didn't respond, hesitant to cause a similar incident to last time and unaware of the fact that The Mentor had planned for that anyway. In fact, it had predicted and plotted out the entire conversation before it had started, leading her into a corner she couldn't back out of and hoping to knock the ungrateful student down a peg.

"Lesson 3, completed," it noted to itself, entirely for her benefit. It had all been entirely for her benefit, to keep up the illusion.

"What are these Lessons, anyway?" she asked, hoping for a few more seconds to get her that much closer to using her phase shifter.

" _These lessons_ ," it began, "are made to evaluate your loyalties and your skills, your strengths and your weaknesses, as well as teach you _lessons_."

"And yet I seem to be completing these Lessons," she answered. "So the first five are just an evaluation before I get more."

"Correct," it said, pleased with her discovery.

"How many more lessons can there possibly _be_?" she asked aghast, the magnitude of what it was talking about sinking in.

"As many as needed," it said vaguely. "Now, enough talking. I have created the perfect simulation for your specific skills sets and your estrange personality. It will be a good motivator for learning to use your new weapons."

The Killjoy growled lowly in frustration. "Motivation?" She had not forgotten the last time The Mentor had used that word and it filled her with trepidation.

"Let us begin."

* * *

The Mentor had closed off areas of the ship with his holographic technology and, without her phase shifter, she was unable to get through them. Whenever she cut down the first wall, the next one was indestructible and on amount of swiping at it was going to get it to fall. She broke her hunting knife the first time she had confronted it, forcing her to follow the hallways to the trap or get speared by a wall of spikes moving slowly behind her. It took the better part of a joor, but she was finally corralled as carefully as possible into the holodeck.

It had been transformed into a gladiatorial ring, much like the Colloseum in its hay-day, stretching high and far in all directions, looking much bigger than the ship had from the outside. Killjoy knew it was an illusion, a trick of the optic she couldn't figure out, but that information didn't help her any. Everything felt real, down to the murmurs of the crowd and the cheers. The holodeck door behind her closed shut and faded out, leaving only the illusion behind.

"A thing to note," said her announcer. "Before Gladiators fought Gladiators, they were pitted against the wildest creatures the planet had to offer. In this case, the Predacons."

The crate door opened opposite her and a creature emerged from it's dark mouth. Long front limbs pumped opposite each other, one moving forward and the other pushing backwards, moving like some massively large lizard. It's face was more like an ape's, with the rounded though longer muzzle and sharp teeth. Its body was short and without a tail, with a stout medium long neck. It had long digits and a wide stance, with the overlapping armor plates of various lengths and sizes creating a very scale like pattern over its features. Those almond shaped dark red optics stared unblinking into her very spark.

"Cool," she said aloud, looking at the unearthly creature with more than a touch of admiration and awe.

"This is a Predacon. While the Insecticons are very much insectoids, Predacons often had a very reptilian and amphibian look to them," the announcer said, pleased.

Killjoy frowned, glancing upwards at the announcer. "Insecti-?" she interrupted herself the instant the creature moved, freezing when her gaze landed back on it. She knew immediately that she was outmatched. Even if she did activate her battle program, she still wouldn't have the skill necessary to defend herself.

"You call yourself a teacher!?" she snarled.

The Mentor didn't deign that with a response and Killjoy's attention was quickly grabbed by the speedily approaching predacon. It moved like a reptile, whipping its legs back and forth and sprinting towards her across the arena so fast it practically flew. She only had time to raise her shield before the predacon struck, nose ramming the shield hard. She dodged around, hoping to avoid the fast moving reptile while looking for some weak points. It drove at her fast and hard, keeping her distracted from evaluating it for weak points.

Killjoy felt the difference almost instantly. Her defense programming had come alive, just as much a ceaseless murmur of sound in the back of her mind as the crowd was. It wasn't pulling her out of the situation and taking over her body, ruthlessly destroying anything that had activated it and leaving a confusing mass of memories and emotions in its wake. But that didn't stop the sudden fear that it might go off, here in the ship. It wouldn't have mattered much, but she had no idea where her sister was currently, or if The Mentor hadn't done anything to her that Killjoy wasn't aware of. She scanned the program on impulse, and it told her that it was now 98 percent integrated into her system.

Noting that she was momentarily distracted, the creature snapped its neck beneath her shield in an attempt to get at from underneath. She jumped back, its unexpected strength pushing it up, and she gave a yelp of shock as its triangular shaped teeth snapped close. Her free arm moved faster than she could think, knocking the surprisingly light-weighted beast away. Her counterattack hadn't been enough to knock it off balance, and it was soon redoubling its efforts to claw through her defense, sensing weakness.

Correcting her shield in the short nanoklik it took for the beast to strike again, she felt the strength of its neck as it slammed its open muzzle into her shield, knocking her back a pace. Its claws clipped her legs with each step, her front leg poked out from beneath her shield as she fought to find her balance and hold her ground. Its head suddenly switched targets, aiming towards her legs and grasping the offending black and white object in its strong jaws, yanking hard. Yelping, she fell, her shield edge crashing down on its head. Infuriated, it snapped at her through the shield, its claws scraped across the hardlight surface, leaving scratches across the practice shield. They were at a momentary stalemate.

If not for the ice cold defense program which had gripped her processor, her thoughts would have gone haywire in an attempt to find a solution. The program's logical approach kept her mind clear of her emotions, detaching her soul from her body and leaving nothing but _cause_ _and effect_ running through her helm. It endlessly tried to predict her enemy's movements, recognizing the patterns in its assault and using her own growing insight into the mind of the beast to seek out an opening, while also evaluating her own strengths and weaknesses in a future counterattack. Her skills were only over shadowed by her inexperience, which dragged her down and made her reaction time too slow. The battle programming understood this and knew how to compensate for it.

Its speed gave her little time for thought, and its weight kept her shield effectively pinned. It was a nice reprieve, but one that was making her lose the one advantage she had - adrenaline.

She shifted the shield upwards, towards her head, shifting its balance and forcing it to scramble against the smooth surface of her shield. Kicking up into its soft belling and knocking the light-weight creature over her head, she twisted onto her front and looked up in time to see it slam into the wall. Twisting up off the ground and raising her shield, she watching in surprise as the creature tried to wiggle off its back, large paws scrambling almost vainly in the air as its body whipped around. After an incredulously long moment in which Killjoy was sure a real lizard would have already flipped over, the predacon was back on its feat and approaching fast. The momentary show of weakness had boosted her confidence, though, as her battle computer wrapped around that weakness like a lifeline.

She whipped sideways, feeling the breeze as it whipped passed. She didn't have the luxury of staying still as it twisted around and snapped at her doorwings. It lunged upwards at her, catching the shield in its mouth and stabbing its claws into her stomach as its neck whipped back and forth. Strong jaws crunched hard, triangular shark teeth cut their serrated edges into the practice shield, cracking the hardlight surface. In a particularly hard twist of its head, the whole shield snapped and the next thing Killjoy knew, her arm was being torn apart by the sharp teeth and whipping neck. Its claws had sank into her armor, puncturing her tanks and ripping out her wires, causing her to bleed. Her strength was pouring out of her abdomen as the creature writhed in victory. Her digits clawed at its mouth, hoping to pry the jaws apart but it was writhing around too frantically to get a grip. Her servo grabbed the back of the creatures neck, hoping to stop the frenzied movements as it tore her arm apart, and felt the world slow down as its head ripped apart her armor, flatworm shaped coils being snagged between its teeth. Ugly unintelligent white orbs were focused on her, not recognizing the look of dull horror which had crept across her face. All she could see was death in those hungry optics.

_No!_

She knew in that instant that no one was going to rescue her. A flickering ember of hope, born of the beginnings of Stockholm Syndome, that the Mentor would save her had died as she looked into its all too real expression, filled with the hungry murder of a hungry beast. Her whole body tensed for its last fight, ready to save her life.

Her servo tightened its grip on the back of the beasts head and she yanked hard as it tore itself away from her useless shield arm, digits dipping into armor as the creatures head snapped downward at the hard yank, opening a crack in its armor it would otherwise have blocked by armor. Her digits were cut by armor as they hooked around, tightening their grip as she wretched her servo hard, her servo and digits slipping free along with some very important wires. The creature floundered for a moment as its legs went haywire, but it turned to attack her, its movements slowed. She half-jumped away, spreading her legs so that one ugly clawed paw flew underneath her and the creature's chest aimed right for her leg. Her arms wrapped around its head, tightening in desperation and failing strength, as she wretched its head sideways. The creature went completely still. Blazing white orb focused on her and she realized with a start that it wasn't dead.

It was paralyzed.

The dead silence was unnerving. The battle computer had dropped back into dormancy, the gentle murmur of the roaring crowd had died like the white noise of the world had gone silent, leaving her trapped in a silent room with a creature, which only moments ago had tried to kill her. Time seemed to stretch before her endlessly, and she didn't even try to move.

A hot white beam of energy suddenly exploded out of nowhere, zapping the paralyzed predacon into dust. She swore for a single second, she could hear the frozen creature's internal mechanisms screaming, screaming to move, to escape, or just to scream. Her tanks twisted.

"Well, that was _interesting_ ," came the bored tones of her Mentor. The world around her had dissolved, returning to its original blue-purple walls. They looked more like _Nemesis_ ' walls with each passing moment. An echo of a pedestep made her slowly turn her attention away from the floor where the predacon had once been. The holomech had materialized a short distance away, looking her over with a blank look. "You need repairs. We shall continue the lesson after that is done."

She stared at it, unable to comprehend. The whirlwind that had been her mind for the last two vorns had disappeared into the echoing silence which hurt her helm. She didn't want to think, the memories she had just made unable to slip away from her grasp.

Everything had felt real, every breath of that creature, every movement, almost as if she had been fighting the real deal. The Mentor had sat back and watched, like every bully she had ever known who preferred to watch his good work from a distance.

She remembered the sound of a car on a sunny day. She was standing on the sidewalk when she realized she was alone. When she was young, she had always been near her sister. They had practically been twins since they were young - and as a kid she had never once thought of her sister as older than her. Even when she had grown up and gone to college, she had never once considered her sister as anything less than her twin - just as she had never once considered her three closest friends as anything less than her sisters. But on that warm sunny day, she hadn't yet met her best friends, and all she had in the world was her sister.

When she had turned around, realizing that her sister wasn't beside her like she always was, the sight before her had given her pause. Her sister's foot had gotten caught in the spokes of the bike they shared, stranding her in the middle of the road. A car had stopped just before her and the driver was just sitting there, in the car. Just sitting there. _Watching_. Watching her sister struggle with her foot in the spoke, a seven year old and her bike.

She had decided that she hated that woman, but she didn't realize until much later just how many in the world were like her. Like The Mentor. She was alone against the world, standing between it and her sister. She had raced into the middle of the street to pick up the bike, so her sister could hobble to the sidewalk. As she offered her shoulder to her sister to lean on, Killjoy remembered looking around, looking for that woman, but she had driven away. As if nothing was wrong. She had done nothing.

She hated people who did _nothing_.

 _Actions speak louder than words_.

"Why haven't you just killed me?" The question escaped her before she could think on it, bitter cold hatred gripping her voice. It had done less than nothing. It had tried to kill her.

It shrugged. "Why haven't _you_ killed _me_?"

It was stupid of the Mentor to remind her of her vow. What had been mere words before had transformed into something else, engraved into her subconscious. Her dark red optics narrowed as words that meant nothing slid from her vocaliser. "You are currently more valuable to me alive then dead," she responded, coldly.

It glanced over its shoulder and that unnatural emotion gleamed red hatred at her. "Same."

She watched it disappear out the door and she couldn't suppress the shudder that wracked her frame. A moan of pain escaped her as claws of fire stung her abdomen and her legs crumbled beneath her, knees splashing in a puddle of energon. Her tanks did flip flops as the world slowly spun around her and she dropped senseless on the floor.

* * *

_I've been treating this too much like one big game.  
_

She was staring up at the ceiling of the not-quite-a-medbay, watching the transforming arms that unfolded from the ceiling check over her systems manually one-by-one. She was ignoring them for the sake of her sanity, not wanting to confirm the horrendous thought that she might actually be unable to move.

Everyone was a chess piece on her board, a variable she had yet to figure out but still followed a pattern. That's how she had viewed the world, as something that could be quantified and controlled. Was it some unknown Cybertronian mentality which had gripped her unawares? She didn't know, but she was tired of treating everything around her like it was new experiment that needed dissection. Some game that need to won.

People's _lives_ hung in the balance and at every turn she was doing everything in her power not to help. When her sisters were trapped under, she did nothing but sit back and watch them sleep, waiting for them to come out of it on their own. When Darklight took too long to do anything interesting, she left the Autobots and the neutrals and put them into even worse possible danger. Was she there to help them? She had thought so, but every action had said otherwise.

She had thought she would be working on automatic to help them, as if she expected herself to suddenly act like a machine. But working towards something took effort - working towards any goal always took some massive amount of dedication which she had been failing to demonstrate. She had goofed off, more interested in learning the story than actually participating in it, and that realization was enough to send a stab of guilt through her over developed ego. It was crushing, thinking on the time she could have spent on freeing her sister when she spent it learning frivolities and trying to alleviate her boredom.

Primus, had she even been paying attention? She had spent so much time in unknown territory and she hadn't bothered to look+ around and check to see if some programming might be lying dormant in the ship. She couldn't have known that there was, but it bothered her that she hadn't thought about it. She had been too busy pulling door panels apart.

And then there were the vows. Like a knight in shining armor, she had thought making the vow in her head would make it so and she suddenly be exercising herself toward that goal for the rest of her life. She had mixed up cause and effect with effort. It would take effort for her to get where she could finally rid herself of The Mentor. It would take effort and self-control to track down the Decepticons. She had blown it all on boredom.

Or almost had. She hadn't gotten any word back from Vibes about the state of affairs on her end. She wasn't even sure Vibes would call her. She seemed like the kind of femme to take things into her own hands, or at the very least prevent everyone else from getting involved with the war. It was a nice sentiment, but Killjoy knew that The Mentor automatically made her involved. Something about the Autobot insignia on his chest, the Decepticon programming and creator, right inside the only home she knew, near her defenseless sister, had made things a whole lot more personal.

She cringed to think about them. How could she have just abandoned them to The Mentor? It didn't make any sense. Had she become so independent that she had forgotten about them? The bond was still there, and granted it did hurt every time she thought about it, but otherwise she didn't feel it at all. A new terror filled her spark - had her sisters died?

It was a ludicrous thought and she knew it the moment she thought it. If her sisters were dead, she knew she would have felt them die. Every fanfic out there had stated as much. But enough had happened to cause reasonable doubt. No fanfic she had run into had been this bizarre. No canon story had been this bizarre. Usually there was a linear understanding - some knowledge of what was going on beyond what she already knew. She was looking at the whole world from one perspective and it was scary and boring. Boring because she was stuck with her own perspective and didn't have something new just lying around the corner. Scary because it meant there was so much going on out there that she didn't know about. Where was Megatron? Was he asleep at the bottom of the sea? Why was Airachnid here? What was she doing? What had happened before she woke up?

There were too many question that she had left unasked, and worse, unanswered. She had dragged in her heels and let the world pass her by. Her vows had become as meaningless as her life. She hadn't done anything, really. She had screwed things up because she hadn't thought things through. She had just _done_ things. Even after the incident with Reverb, she was still just _doing_ things. She hadn't thought things through.

And here was the opportunity to do just that and she was busy bemoaning her fall from grace. Frustration made her ground her teeth and mental rebate herself into the dust. Slaggit, why was she so stubborn?

And why has she been cussing in Cybertronian for the last few seconds? She looked over her thoughts and realized with alarm that she had been thinking in Cybertronian this entire time. Even though it was faster than thinking in English, it was certainly slower than what she was used to - or was that her perception messing things up again?

She dropped that thought as soon as it show up. It was a philosophical question, one that would get her walking her mind around in circles for hours. It was useless to think about in her situation when more important things should be weighing on her mind.

The Mentor had said something about her weapons adapting to the changes in atmosphere. She had no other weapons beyond her shield as far as she knew, which meant she was missing some valuable information - or perhaps even a program that would tell her she had a weapon. Really, when it came down to it, she was a machine and a machine needed programming before it could move its own parts. She had found neither hide nor hair of the program within her systems and it was starting to drive her crazy.

Seeing this thought process as nothing more than a dead end, she turned her attention to the updated message from the newly dubbed 'Original Killjoy'. Those two words together threw her entire history as Killjoy into an entirely different perspective, one that seemed to like to sit at the tip of her tongue. She wasn't able to fully grasp the connection and she felt that she need some valuable piece of information. Like what? Gut instinct told her that something about the world around her wasn't real, but she didn't know _what_ about it wasn't real. It was infuriating, like words at the tip of her tongue she couldn't say.

 _It will come in time_.

 _Lazy,_ she chastised herself. _I can't wait around anymore._

What she should have done, instead of coming to this blasted ship, was survey the territory around the mountains, expand her patrols. Instead, she had come back here. As if it had drawn her here. She had told herself that she hadn't come here for the information about her creator, but the next thing she knew she was wondering just exactly who this mysterious person was. How could he know about the humans? How did _The Mentor_ know about the humans? Were they just made up?

Perhaps that would have made sense, if not for the simple fact that her human 'hallucination' had details about the Autobots and Neutrals that she shouldn't possibly know. After all, if she was created by the same creature that created The Mentor - who might be this Original Killjoy - then she should know only half of what she knew now. After all, who wasted time and effort to create thousands of different Transformer Universes, fanfiction, and the like? Considering every Batman episode she had seen about dreams, it was a left brain and right brain thing. The part of you that dreamed couldn't read the written word. Her human self had been able to read, therefore it couldn't have been a dream. This meant that the Mentor was lying when he said they shared the same creator.

Assuming that their creator and this Original Killjoy were the same person, that is. If they were different, if the Mentor had been referring to some other creature she hadn't met yet, then that meant something else entirely about the Original Killjoy.

Was this all a simulation? The thought was like a lightbulb had gone off in her head. It made sense for a simulation to include something she found familiar. If that was the case, though, what was she being tested for?

The Five Lessons were only part of it. She hadn't gotten any word on what they were, what she had done to complete them, and to attempt to figure it out now left her possibly getting the answer wrong. Only the Mentor himself knew what was going on.

But she had tried to hack into the Mentor to destroy it, but only suffered because of it. She couldn't even remember if she had found anything. It left her wanting and even more curious than ever before.

 _If you thought erasing it from my memory was going to prevent me from looking into it_ , she thought at the Mentor, knowing he couldn't hear. _Think again._

She had found out the problem and now she was working to solve it. She needed to think carefully and act quickly, before anything else happened.

* * *

Foolish child.

The Hivemaster hadn't done anything of the sort.

It was irritating.

The fact that the virus was also affecting her was alarming.

What else could explain it?

It was happening right in front of him, being recorded, but he didn't have enough evidence to do anything about it and that bothered him. He would have to change his ways of remembering just to keep a step ahead of the virus. The information would have to be stored in another part of his processor. Lucky for him, he had a recent expansion of his processors in the last stellar cycle and lots of space to fill up with information. A quick change in the program which sorted out his memories was all it took to prevent the virus from destorying them, and he could then return his attention to his Student without risk of losing essential data.

When he had first met this troublesome mind he had known right off the bat that this Rhythm character thought too much. Her default character was an observant and manipulative sociopath-wannabe. If not for her ability to actually grow in character, she might very well _be_ a sociopath. Even as it stands, she wasn't far from falling off the edge into that territory. He viewed the thing holding her back without any real emotion, viewing it as the only thing preventing her from becoming indominable and straight up scary – if he was capable of feeling fear.

Emotions were difficult for him to understand, and he tried his darndest not to. Because of his ability to divine emotion through observation, he was stuck with two fully developed emotions in his otherwise empty emotional center – love and hatred. One cannot forget an emotion after one has thoroughly learned its principles, or divined it from the understanding of another.

He could not recall a time when he ever had all emotions – too much of his memories in the distant past had been destroyed due to some fool hardy war against odds that could never be feasibly beaten by a creature of his speciality. He assumed he never had any to begin with and only developed love through his first Student, and then quickly learned its opposite.

His most distant memories were sketchy at best. He only remembered escaping, protecting his charges, and seeking out erratic spark signatures across the galaxy, most of which had no visible form for him to absorb and reconstitute. He entirely devoted to his charges and, as far as he was concerned, everything which came before him beginning his self-appointed mission to find them sparks was unimportant. His charges, which would later become his Students, were all that mattered. Making them happy and nuturing them to maturity were secondary compared to his greater goals. He returned his attention to his new Student.

Default programming was easier to understand than emotions, and the bonus effect was that it never changed his own core programming to investigate into it. Rhythm's default programming was simple, driven by a desire to protect those she cared about including from herself, viewing herself as a powerful and dangerous creature that needed to be punished whenever it went out of hand. It was a childishness innate to her character and immaturity. That was what the whole simulation had been built towards; establishing a universe where all her secret thoughts and desires were met. A secret sexual interest had built the building blocks of most of the characters and an estrange belief that every male on the planet was sexually aroused at all times was merely icing on the cake.

But the duplicity of humankind, the ability to believe one thing but think according to an entirely different belief, seemed to have started a rift between her and the simulation he had so painstakingly applied. It wasn't the first time this had happened so he was not entirely without experience in dealing with it. However, it was the first time that his patch job had not worked. He worried that it might mean he was unable to fix the problem without out first wiping the slate clean. But that was a last possible solution, one which he'd have to fight his own core programming in order to enact. She was better without a personality anyway and it would be interesting to see if he could create a living breathing and fully functioning mech with only their default programming to work from.

Now that his memories weren't being muddled, he quickly found himself extrapolating a very interesting and very worrisome threat. It was a familiar touch, older than his own touch, and one he had felt only twice before in the distant past – from two separate sources. His Creator.

Something else had been pulling the Hivemaster's Student's strings, to whatever end. It was not aiding Mentor's cause to push forward and complete the conversion process on his Student's mind, which made it a threat to his Student's future health. It would have to be dealt with as quickly and thoroughly as possible, but alas he could not do that after that last EMP burst. It might not have physically affected anything but it had effected the simulation, which meant he would have to wait for an opportunity in the simulation in order to fix the problem.

Or perhaps he could bypass the simulation again and just force her into shut down? It was a last resort, considering the amount of internal programming he would have to work around to see it through.

Which brought another conern. This touch of his Creator might very well mean that the only creature in the universe that could fix his programming was near by. His programming was troublesome and prevented him from helping his Students most of the time. It would take centuries to work around it again and he did not have the time. Multiple other conversion processes were in progress and he could not just switch from one goal to another and expect everything to fall in line. No, he had to stay the course. This was much better than the old programming anyway.

He would have to work through the medium he had control over already. It was an inhibitor on the speed of the process but he was patient and in no rush to complete the process anyway. He would rather it never be completed for any reason anyway. Too many of his Students left and never came back. There were too many dangers out there. He had tried to send them out in groups, gestalt teams, anything and everything that would protect them but it seemed very few if any of them survived. It was worrisome.

Problem detected. New emotion might be forming. He checked its progress and was satisfied that his internal software was prevent it from forming. He returned his attention to Rhythm's manifestation.

* * *

The one upside to being in the not-quite-a-medbay was the arsenal of weapons on the medbay tables that her sisters never used. She hadn't wanted to touch them before, because she had felt they belonged to her sisters, but now she had a different reason for taking them. She never wanted her sisters to have them.

Reverb's death had impacted her like it never had before. Perhaps she had finally let it sink in that she had killed that had triggered her sudden desire to keep all the weapons away from her sisters. Killjoy didn't care about the whys anymore. Her mind was a razor sharp edge of focus, other issues dissolving into nothingness. Her targets were Airachnid and The Mentor, her charges were Vibes and her sisters. Nothing else mattered. Not Darklight, not Allout, and not a single Decepticon.

 _Are you ready to become_ this _heartless_? her inner voice asked.

 _What other choice do I have_? _What else am I supposed to do? I can't solve_ everyone _'s problems and I can't even solve those I_ can _do perfectly._

Guilt tickled her conscious, but she didn't let it penetrate the brick walls inside her mind. _I will do what I can when I can_ , she promised, _but no more._

One day, she would figure out what weapons The Mentor was talking about, but because most of its words had led her astray before she had decided this was just a secret she was going to have to abandon. She didn't want to - it went against everything she was - but she decided other things were more important and this secret was more she'd have to drop despite her curiosity.

She pulled a long sword off her sister's berth table and a brace which she put over her fixed arm. It was the perfect protection against the predacon when it attacked her again.

"Mentor," she called, knowing it could hear her. "Lead me back to your Colosseum and send me your best." _This time, I_ am _ready._

She felt ready, all the way down to her very core. It was no longer a system of 'I found the problem and I have it solved now, even though I know I have hundreds of other problems to solve; I'm ready'. This was a 'I am ready, because slaggit I will never be ready'. It's a strange concept to grasp, knowing one is not ready but not caring. Whether she liked it or not, she was ready. She was ready to take on the world.

The not-quite-a-medbay's doors opened, and she left the laboratory at a sharp trot, not even bothering to turn down hallways she knew were roundabout ways of getting to the holodeck. Walls blocked her way, except for a path leading straight to the Colosseum. She heard their screams even before the door opened to admit her. They were all ignored. Her focus was on one thing only; her opponent.

She recognized the purple and blue seeker which uncharacteristically stood boldly up from the opposite end of the arena, stance ready and waiting with calm serenity, from the upraised massive shield to the sword that duplicated the one Killjoy was currently wearing.

It didn't even surprise her to be facing off against her twin.


	12. Threat

Killjoy twirled her new blade experimentally, nervously, as she stared into the purple-bluish optics of her twin.

It was obvious it wasn't the same femme she had left behind in the not-quite-a-medbay, but that didn't make it any easier to face her here and now. She felt her digits tense in the bracer, her mind scrambling to analyze the threat that stood before her, back straight and face blank, wings swept high in angry lines. The identical sword was entirely made of metal, with blue lines showing the through seams and an inch long, razor sharp energon blade gleaming imperceptibly in the light. She would have felt grateful that she had decided to get the blade, but that gratefulness was preempted by her calm, calculated numbness. She had to play The Mentor's game for the moment, until she got free, and that meant she needed to apply her absolute focus on the simulation.

Her phase shifter told her it was 32 percent rebooted, which told her that the Mentor had forced it back into a reboot when she was knocked offline. He was bound and determined to keep her, this time, and who knows how far he had to go before she became the next Stockholm Syndrome victim. She wasn't sure she had recovered enough from the last _Lesson_ the Mentor had given her, and she was sincerely glad that this time wouldn't be as… unusual punishment. The Mentor practically redefined 'Strange and Unusual Punishment'.

She knew that the question that needed to be asked is _why_ he would go to such great length to re-educate her. What was the purpose of doing all this, and then presumably planning to do it to her sisters? What was the end game? Who were they being trained to fight against, or even for?

The holotwin was not as awkwardly graceful as the predacon, but she was graceful and she was fast, and had an ability that more than made up for her lack of firepower. At least that's what her processor was telling her, much in the same way it told her that her twin's name is Rhyme instead of her real name, which her mind refused for her to even think about let alone say. Did The Mentor have something to do with that, too?

Primus, there was so much she had overlooked.

She dodged the first strike, a slash sideways that would have cut her in half if she hadn't developed some small amount of reflexes in the last vorn. It helped that her defense programming was fully integrated into her systems, increasing her reaction time at startlingly levels and making her feel as if she was merely going through the motions, as if she had practiced this millions of times before. The defense program gave her a way to predict Rhyme's movements, and she flowed smoothly from one parry to another strike, dancing around her twin with grace and skill of a natural fighter.

And just like that, Rhyme stopped teasing or testing the waters, and began fighting more fiercely and savagely. What had started as a surprisingly smooth transition transformed into a struggle to get beyond her holotwin's penetrating attacks. The style of fighting reminded her of her twin's, precise and accurate, though without any real power. She had to scramble to come up with a counter measure, to get off the defensive.

It was hardly a surprise that her battle computer told her that the only way to win is if she became more viscous. She wasn't sure she could bring herself to hurt her sister, the first person she had sworn to protect until the day she died. She had kept her promise, literally, but she couldn't attack the heart of that promise – to protect her twin, regardless of circumstances. Would she be breaking that promise if she purposefully harmed her sister?

But this wasn't her sister. Regardless of what her mind was telling her, this was a hologram of her twin. Her spark knew the truth, and there was the familiar painful unresponsiveness over the bond. They were still in a coma, or else she wouldn't be ignored.

A familiar burn started in her spark and she swore silently to herself. Regardless of her promise to her twin, this holotwin was going to end up costing her more than her limbs if she distracted herself too long with the memory of the bond and if she refused to attack back. She redirected a blow with a parry and kicked out with a pede into the back of the holotwin's knee joint, knocking her off-balance for a split second, allowing an opening for her borrowed blade to slide up against neck armor, biting into throat. They both become still.

"I would suggest killing her now," came The Mentor's bland announcer voice, the crowd becoming obediently quieter though it refused to go completely silent. The buzzing sound had become distinctly more buzz-like instead of the distinct shouts of an actual audience, though it seemed to have a beat to it, steady and rhythmic.

"You can't possibly ask me to do that," she said, her voice oddly emotionless. "I died for her, and there's no way I'm going to turn around on my promise now."

"You don't have a choice," he pointed out. "Kill her now before her ability kills you."

The Mentor had timed it perfectly, as warnings flashed across her HUB. She was losing connection to upper digits, and flash of pain in that part of her body made her turn curiously to blink at the scene. Thousands, no millions, of nanobots had started unfolding from Rhyme's form, turning her shoulder in a shapeless mass that attacked her sword hand. She dropped the blade like it was snake and backed away into a wall, before turning to race away, tearing off her digit armor. It was a useless endeavor; the nanobots weren't just on her armor, they were inside her armor as well and working away at her endoskeleton. She had dropped her sword, preventing her from just cutting off the offending limb and throwing it away. She had no other weapon at her disposal.

"You're trying to kill me," she snarled.

"No," he said, with no level of assurance. "I'm trying to destroy your creativity."

"By putting me in situations that allow my creativity to flourish?" she asked, with a snort, mind racing.

"Yes."

Rhythm's head snapped around, looking upwards towards an announcer she couldn't see. The platform the announcer had been on was nowhere to be found. The crowd was fading, her holotwin had stood up and retrieved the other sword and now was making her way over to her. Her digits were being eaten away by holographic bugs. It was a nightmare come true, but she still didn't feel any emotion. She memory researched nanobot technology, not looking for new information but recalling an old memory file, about a conversation she had with her sister.

She had decided long ago, when talking to her sister about possible technologies she could invent, of having a kill switch for nanobots. EMPs always, somehow, became involved in those discussions.

EMPs were just a burst of sound that short circuited everything in an area of effect.

She knew that the orca used sound as well, though perhaps didn't have the echolocation so necessary for dolphins and bats to survive with, but a creative momentary transformation would solve the problem. Her working arm transformed and in the heartbeat it took for it to form, the holotwin realized what she was about to do and charged, both swords swinging. She tossed the blade just before the entire room flickered black as the gun fired a EMP burst. Killjoy's own systems had braced for any damage it might do to her, but it didn't affect her at all.

The blade was the real one that she had stolen from her real twin and it buried itself into her gun shoulder. The nanobots eating away at her arm died and disintegrated, without any power source to keep the hologram up and operational. She hadn't expect the EMP burst to effect the ship, and her phase shifter was only at 53 percent operational. She'd have to blast her way out if she was going to escape.

Wincing as she transformed her gun and gritting her teeth against the pain, she moved her arm so as not damage her shoulder anymore and possibly lose the mobility in that arm as she pulled the blade out. A few flecks of energon glowed briefly as it connected with the walls, before being swallowed up by the darkness around her. She used the blade as a makeshift walking stick, burying the tip into the floor before pushing herself carefully to her pedes, mindful that any slip up with the blade could send it slicing through her armor. When she was standing, she lifted the blade and hugged her arms close to her body as she aimed for where she though the door was.

She wasn't blind. Her doorwings detected small abnormalities in the walls around her and she was using her echolocation powers to locate the vague bulge of a circular door in the wall. With the power out, it was impossible to open, but she wasn't going to wait for the power to turn on. Gripping the blade in her damaged servo and barely moving damaged arm, she began hacking and prying the door open. Three layers of door interlocking mechanisms were surprisingly easy to pry apart, but she was urged on by the desire to escape.

Some type of alien adrenaline was pumping through her veins, causing more energon to spill on the floor than what was healthy. She wanted out, and a little pain didn't matter to her anymore. Metal groaned as she pried it apart, it shrieked as she hacked away at offending pieces that got in the way of her getting to the other side. Some metal clattered loudly to the floor, startling her, but she paused long enough to assure herself that it wasn't the holograms coming back online. Killjoy escaped the holodeck, racing down familiar hallways to the exit.

The airlock door barred her way, but her doorwings told her that there was another exit in the floor; a part of the floor that was a tunnel leading to another tunnel. She didn't ask question, but used the escape route to make her way up and out, arriving in the area just beyond the airlock door. She took the familiar tunnels leading back up, noting the snake-like coil that zig-zagged up toward the surface. A breath of fresh air hit her and she stopped in the mouth of the cave.

 _I should never have gone down there,_ she decided. _It was a wasted trip anyway. And all for what? To alleviate some of my boredom?_

Regardless of her thoughts, she knew it wasn't a wasted trip. She now knew what The Mentor's motives were. He was trying to get into her head and destroy her mind, whether through Stockholm Syndrome or through forcing her to fight her sister, though for what purpose she didn't know. She had managed to escape each time, but had she really?

He knew who her creator was, and she had failed to figure that out for herself. All she had for her efforts was a helmache, a bracer, a sword and a few new injuries. A few wins and a few loses, so it wasn't entirely pointless.

And that message file. Why had it only gotten bigger? A lot of her datafiles had gotten bigger, though she didn't know if that was a result from The Mentor's meddling or not.

It was stupid of her to return to that place. How could she be so foolishly arrogant to think that The Mentor wouldn't hurt her? He had raped her, and now he was trying to destroy her mentally. She should avoid him. Even if her curiosity demanded she go back, because she knew he had all the answers. She would just have to find those answers elsewhere, even if it would be much easier to get them from the source. She couldn't deal with The Mentor anymore.

She shuddered a strange chill went up her backstrut, much like she knew something terrible was going to happen except she didn't know. Oddly enough, she wasn't unfamiliar with this feeling. Her thoughts traced it back to the battle computer, predicting the possible future. Perhaps it was the fact that it seemed to so accurately predict the human future and use that to create her human memories, or perhaps it was that when she was a real human she had come across similar feelings before, but she knew that someone big was about to happen. She couldn't tell what, though.

With only her weapon a blade and with two defunct arms, she decided to wait for her phase shifter to fully reboot so she wouldn't have to worry about being assaulted in the middle of the night while wandering through the forest. Her stealth needed tons of work without using her phase shifter and she wasn't afraid to admit that. She probably wouldn't be able to work on it for the next thousands of years, if at all.

It had been more than a third an orn that had passed since she had left behind her communication number to Vibes and not once in all that time had Vibes called her back. She didn't have a voice message waiting for her, and that might be because she couldn't get voice messages over the comm. line. She hadn't plucked enough information from Reverb for her to be able to figure that out.

Her phase shifter was around 86 percent rebooted when the call came in.

::The Killer's Joy, this is Vibes,:: came the voice, hesitating. ::You wanted me to inform you when Darklight made his move.::

Recalling Reverb's data on how to answer comm. lines, she pressed a digit to her helm. ::What's the situation?::

::He's disappeared. Along with all the neutrals.::

Reverb's unexpected journey into the wilderness popped to mind and her optics narrowed. ::They've gone to the Decepticon base, most likely.:: Killjoy felt a stab of disappointment, knowing that Allout wouldn't leave enough of Airachnid for her to find. But there was a reason this was all happening. ::It was dumb of you to announce your plans to leave Earth.::

::We did not anticipate this big of a backlash,:: she said, chastened.

::Darklight has Allout wrapped around his digits,:: she said, realizing that she, a normal Terran Cybertronian, was chewing out a trained Autobot Special Ops agent. It seemed wrong. No, it _was_ wrong, especially when she was Jazz's bonded. ::But you don't believe Darklight is the traitor.::

::He is a neutral. We don't have rights to monitor his movements.::

::Bullshit,:: she snarled, though the word she had actually used was fragslag. Yeah, it was as weird as it sounded, and not a real Cybertronian word. ::You were supposed to protect the neutrals from all threats, both foreign and domestic.::

::And you and your army?:: she hissed, annoyed. ::Can't you stop them?::

::No,:: she said, realizing belatedly that this was not the time to come clean. Instead, she decided to continue playing the con until she could speak to Vibes face-to-face about the reality of the situation. ::We can't interfere between the neutrals and Decepticons, for reasons more complicated than you can understand. However, we can whisk you away to a safer location in the meantime, in case the neutrals lose and the Decepticons come to pick an easy meal.::

::Noted,:: Vibes mused, ::but I had previously got the distinct impression you would be going after them.::

 _You are a Special Ops mech. You would know why._ But then she realized that this must be a test of some sort, to test whether or not she was telling the truth. ::You have been given a deck of cards, Vibes. You can't exchange them for a new set now. Accept the help given, especially on an alien planet.::

::I'm not entirely sure I believe half the things you say to me,:: Vibes muttered quietly, perhaps so she could hear. Her doorwings twitched in annoyance. ::I would prefer it if we stayed on board, in case we need to leave.::

::Do you think the Decepticons will let you leave?:: Killjoy asked, checking her phase shifter. It read 92 percent. ::What if they have a bomb already on your ship?::

::I doubt it. We have sensors that detect bombs onboard.::

::Double check those sensors in case any other spies haven't already tapped them. I'll be there in a breem.:: She cut the line.

The Killjoy frowned. Reality doesn't work this way, she mused. A skilled and trained Special Ops fighter doesn't survive without learning to keep their enemies close. Either Vibes isn't skilled enough to be a Special Ops, or she isn't skilled enough to be a sub-commander. She doubted that Vibes was both, or else she would never had gotten this extremely important flight gig into Outer Space.

But what did that _mean_ in the grand scheme of things?

Perhaps she needed to ask another question. Why was the only canon character around acting very out of character?

But Vibes was a minor character in the comics, assumed to be special ops, so she wasn't a good way of figuring out everything wrong with the universe. Red Alert, on the other hand, was not at all out of character, or perhaps he was.

Since when did Red Alert become skilled enough at acting to become a Special Ops bot? Last she check, he was either purely Security bot or she was a medic. Why send their most skilled and paranoid Security Director out on a mission where he would never return from? The Killjoy felt that Reverb wouldn't have the answers to that. No one would.

But why?

She recalled the message she had received, in its now expanded form. It had spoken of a dream, a nightmarish world which she would succumb to and possibly never awaken from. Was this it?

Killjoy stared over the land and looked out and beyond the strange trees that rustled in the wind. Not quite modern day trees but still retaining the basic shape. She had always thought that this was because they were ancient trees that hadn't yet adapted over the years to her modern day environment. But the fish had taken around a hundred and fifty years to loose their eye sight, and though that could be chalked up to some religious explanation, she doubt it had anything to do with Eve eating the apple. If the Cybertronians had been around for longer than the humans had been around, that meant that war had existed. War was sin and sin was something that could be spread by touch, or so some preachers of the Bible would have her believe. She didn't honestly know; the only parts of the book she had taken seriously were the text in Revelation, but this was obviously a Genesis story and not the end of the world.

The fact that the fish adapted to the darkness and lost their eyesight meant that they had to have been created as perfect creatures, creatures that lived in environments such as coral reefs, where light was in large supply. That meant that whoever created them hadn't intended for them to disappear into the dark depths of the seas and, with the aid of over population, accidentally cause the sea to turn darker and grimier within a short time frame. Perhaps the creator was mortal instead of omniscient, unable to account for all the variables that a creator of the universe would be able to account for.

If that was the case, then who was the creator and why did he see fit to put her on this planet of organic material even though she pure metal? Was it some type of joke? A jab at her past as a human?

Or was it something else? Something familiar so that she could easily adapt to her future as a permanent Cybertronian?

100 percent.

She paused in her musing to check the phase shifter again, hardly believing that it was working already. It was the first time that something had happened to distract her from figuring out the truth, and it caused her to wonder just how close she had been to solving the mystery.

Killjoy didn't believe in coincidences. To her, coincidences were evidence of a higher intelligence, on a higher plane of existence, and the only higher intelligence she was willing to accept into her life was a real, true, pure God, and not someone who was playing the part. In other words, this so-called Creator was going to find himself six feet under for attempting to play the part. The Killjoy didn't take kindly to people playing god.

So, how did Airachnid fit into all of this? She didn't have enough first hand information about the Decepticon sub-commander to put the pieces together, though a part of her wanted to believe that she was source of all this. It was easier to put the blame on an unknown variable, but she struggled to reconcile with the part of her that held out that she might not be the cause of all for good reason. She didn't have all the information.

Whirling her new sword in her arm and turning on her phase shifter, the invisible, mostly-intangible shoulder slinked through the trees towards the treeline, making a beeline for _Ark-One_ in hopes of figuring out where Darklight and the Neutrals had disappeared to. They would lead her to Airachnid and answers.

A contingency of Autobots waited outside for her when she arrived and she dropped the phaser when she recognized Vibes at the head of the forces. The reaction from the other Autobots was mixed, from surprise and shock to curiosity and wariness. The latter two was respectable.

"I'm surprised you waited this long," Killjoy told them. "Even a group of mechs should be easy enough for you outsiders to track."

"We aren't going to track them," Vibes said pointedly. "We aren't here to break your rules."

The Killjoy glanced over the bots. "So you haven't, but that only makes your assembly here even more confusing."

"A few of the others didn't believe it when I told them there were natives on the planet."

"Ah," The Killjoy said with a dismissive and angry nod. "Not for the fact that I told you that there might be a bomb on board?"

The dead silence that greeted that statement caused murmurs to rise up among the assembled Autobots. Vibes' audio fin flicked in irritation, but Killjoy wasn't interested in keeping a cool demeanor about it.

"Your trust in your Autobot brethren is sorely lacking, Vibes. It is no wonder you do not make a fit Sub-Commander." Which was odd considering that the Autobots were built on trust, not because they wanted to trust each other, but out of necessity out on the battlefield. If you couldn't trust the Autobots out on the field, you couldn't trust them off the field either.

_Have you figured it out yet?_

The out of place statement almost sounded as if someone had said it aloud, but Vibes looked too chastened to have registered the comment. The Killjoy almost dismissed it off-handedly, but too many things didn't add up for her to just blatantly disregard this strangeness.

"I will be leaving to handle the Neutrals," she said, realizing as she said it that something else was off about the whole situation, but that could be chalked up to Optimus Prime not being there. He would have insisted that the Autobots deal with the crisis, even though he knew he didn't have jurisdiction here. "Which direction did you last see them go in?" she asked, curious.

"That way," Vibes said, gesturing in the opposite direction from which she had come towards a distant mountain.

In the opposite direction, too, of where Darklight had directed Reverb to meet the Decepticon. Both locations were pointed semi-northerly, like the non-existent east and west poles had a bend somewhere and the alligator mouth was pointing towards the north. She cut off in a diagonal, disappearing back into the phase zone, the world turning dull and grey again. She pushed her way unhindered through the forest and came across the trampled brush easily enough, a zigzag pattern aimed only partially north. It was aimed towards the only part of the horizon without a mountain.

The more she walked down this road, the more she felt that she had traveled this road once before, in another lifetime. But she felt that she wasn't alone, like multiple people had come with her to attack the Decepticons. It made her feel off, like something was wrong, but it struck her towards the core of her being.

She paused when she realized that the trail had turned back in on itself, now directed north-west instead of north-east. The zigzag transformed into a straight line and the pedesteps seemed to have gained length, bounding and leaping through the forest in excitement to get to their destination. Killjoy was running too, but her path was to reach the opposite side of the trail, cut through the trees and cut back, following the main trail parallel but keeping her pedeprints out of sight.

A jagged hill with a part of it dug out looked almost natural with the strange vegetation growing over it, like kudzu grown over houses. It was a testament to how long the obstruction had been there, and how quickly nature had attempted to reclaim the half-buried vessel that had become the end of Airachnid's ship. Killjoy's own knowledge of organic material and their submissive dominance of the world gave her the advantage when it came to picking out the unnatural gleaming grey that was most definitely not a rocky cliff face.

Killjoy glanced backwards over her shoulder, towards the grey of the horizon and the mountain she called home. It's jagged top peered tentatively over the swaying tops of the trees. Even in the protection of the phase shifter, Killjoy had never felt so powerless. She had no idea what lay beyond the rise and inside the vegetation covered vessel.

What was Airachnid like?

Shaking herself, she pulled herself to her pedes and readied her sword. She hadn't felt like this when she had climbed aboard the Autobot vessel, but at that time she hadn't been aware that her phase shifter _could_ malfunction, and she knew that the Autobots wouldn't harm her if it did. The same couldn't be said of the Decepticons.

Then she remembered that she was injured. The injury didn't start hurting until she glanced at it and remembered. That wasn't what tipped her off, though. She had gotten injured before and forgotten about it and wasn't able to feel the pain before. She had looked it up once and learned that it was natural for something like that to happen. If a human forgot they were hurt, the brain could be tricked into forgetting they were in pain.

No, what caused her to suddenly become suspicious of it was the simple fact that _Vibes_ and the _Autobots_ hadn't noticed it and used it to their advantage to come along. Either the Autobots had less backbone than she had thought, or worse, less of an ethical side to them, or something else was going on, and she found it more easily to believe the latter. Then she remembered the Autobot line up, and how one distinct figure had been missing. The only other canon character she had met. Siren, or the disguised Red Alert.

It was hard to tell if he was the only one missing, but it certainly seemed that way. It was odd, considering Red Alert's paranoia. He would be there, checking to make sure everything was secure in case she was a threat. Why was he gone?

The answer was that he wouldn't be gone, unless someone made him disappear. And the only one she knew with a motive to make the Autobot's security director disappear was Darklight.

In an instant, she was doubling back. What more perfect way to get rid of the Autobots than to attack them when the entire neutral party was well out of blast range and Darklight was safe?

She didn't really have to think about it. The neutrals weren't as important as the Autobots, the one who actually tried their hardest to fight the Decepticons. Besides, she had made a promise to herself and to Vibes, to protect Jazz's bonded. Everything else meant little in the wake of that promise.

The Ark-One's surrounding area had already been cleared of Autobots and it only took one look at the arrangement of muddy pedeprints for her to realize that the Autobots hadn't left the ship. She shot up the ramp into the belly of the ship, briefly registering with surprise that the door was open. Perhaps they hoped that the neutrals would return eventually didn't want to lock them out? _Idiots_ , she silently seethed. It was another sign that Red Alert wasn't entirely in control of the situation, which was most likely going to get them all killed.

In the next few seconds, she had navigated the ship so as to arrive at the Autobot's command deck and general meeting room. She flickered into existence, fully aware that the bot on security probably would be able to see her though not really notice as quickly as Red Alert would.

::Vibes,:: she said over the comms, poking her last used frequency. ::This is The Killjoy.::

::This is Vibes,:: she said, a hint of being honestly surprised. ::What do I owe the pleasure?::

::Where is Siren?:: she said, getting straight to the point and hoping her urgency got the femme to move. ::I should have been registered on hi-her security cams by now.::

::We have someone else working the security hub right now,:: she said, rather vague. ::Where are you?::

::In the meeting room,:: she said, ::where you spoke with Optimus Prime.:: She dropped his name on purpose, hoping for a reaction.

::I'll be there,:: she said, oblivious.

::No. Tell your troops to gather all their weapons, on hand energon, and everything they can pack on the go. Then tell them all to meet me here in less than three breems.::

::Why?:: she asked, though only slightly suspicious and more annoyed. ::Are we being evicted?::

::No. You are being saved. This ship is about to explode.::

She cut off the communications link, worried that she might question her more and risk losing the urgency of the situation. She hoped she was right, because otherwise she'd be doing this for no real reason at all and lose whatever little trust the Autobots had in her to begin with.

* * *

It was earlier that very cycle when Darklight had set his plan into motion. He had called on everyone he knew would be willing and able to do it, everyone he had learned over the years was as much a double agent as he was and even some who weren't, but the latter weren't told what exactly everything entailed. They just thought that it was to get revenge on the overtly paranoid Siren.

Everything was happening pretty fast, but Darklight was in a hurry. He didn't know how much time he had left to make his move and he was frankly sick and tired of waiting. Whether Airachnid liked it or not, he was going to ditch these soft-sparked Autobots. He didn't care what experiments Airachnid was planning or how many test subjects she wanted alive, he was going to end the Autobots and hand over the other neutrals for her pitspawned spark experiments.

He didn't know all the details. All he knew was that she had a way of breaking a bond, and Darklight was more than happy to break his bond with the arrogant, full-of-herself mech he had bonded with. With Airachnid's acclaimed resources currently on earth, he was more than willing to sell his bonded for a chance of spark freedom. Consequences be damned. He was tried of playing this game and wanted nothing more than to cozy up to his new toy.

Darklight shifted, annoyed, as he was forced to wait for his contact to arrive. He was standing just inside _Ark-One_ , in the cargo bay, not even trying to hide from the security cameras. Siren would already be somewhere far away with very little chance of getting back in time and no communications. Ironic, how it would be the Head of Security would spared from the oncoming catastrophe. It would be amusing to see her try to explain that to Optimus Prime, if the Autobots even came to attempt a rescue operation. With all the work they had to do on the frontlines, that was a slim possibility. The planet with its concealing atmosphere was the perfect place for his retirement.

"Darklight," a white and grey femme greeted him, causing his attention to shift to her. She was petite, but the war had forced her to upgrade on body armor, making her shoulders and hips a little wider due to the extra armor protecting her main joints. Her expression was carefully neutral. "I heard that you had spoken with that Decepticon intruder a while back."

The black mech was equally neutral, wariness making him hide beneath a mask. This was not what he was expecting from a fellow spy. "Yes, when she explained herself to Vibes."

The Autobot's strange yellow optics narrowed. "This way," she responded cryptically. Darklight waited until they were walking down a hallway before he started speaking again.

"Silvercross is functioning?" Darklight asked, feigning concern and keeping up pretenses.

"She will be fine," she responded, the ice in her voice clear. Her audio kibble was rigid and cold, defensive almost. It was a very Decepticon attitude, to be defensive towards another con, one which was telling to anyone who knew where to look for it.

"Good," Darklight responded. "Is she off-ship?"

The femme paused and sighed.

"Everything is ready."


	13. Trigger

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The last pieces fall into place.

"It's time for you to leave this ship."

She was very blunt about it, and it was no surprise to her that her audience recognized her serious-business face on sight. It was an expression the Autobots would have come accustom to when in times of war. Most of them would have seen a similar look on the face of a friend or an officer before they or someone else died.

It was perhaps the only reason they did not question _why_ they had to leave the ship.

Strongarm, a blue and yellow she-mech, gave her a suspicious look. "Most of the crew are here, but we are missing a few."

It was obligation to her position as Second-in-Command that caused her to say that, rather than any real recognition of Killjoy's authority and understanding of the matter. Killjoy understood that, but it made her aware that someone very important was missing from the line up.

"Where's Vibes?" she asked.

"Would it matter that she was here?" Strongarm said, though without any bitterness. Killjoy looked at her strangely, noting for the second time in as many minutes that she reminded her of Transformers Prime's Strongarm. Physically at least.

"Why do you ask me that question?" she answered defensively. "Do you want her to survive?"

Strongarm didn't answer, but she stared at Killjoy until the black, gray and white mech was forced to look away.

"If she doesn't get here in a breem, I'm going to initialize plans to leave this ship post haste." Killjoy turned her attention to the others in the room. "I cannot remain behind for just one femme or mech."

"And what about Red Alert?" Strongarm prodded.

Killjoy's head snapped around and she stared at Strongarm. She paused, remembering that she wasn't supposed to know Red Alert's name. "Who?"

Strongarm scolded. "The mech you first met with Vibes. He's the only male among us right now."

This time her false surprise transformed to real shock. "What did you say?" she asked, her voice gone soft. She never got a chance to get a response because suddenly Vibes entered the room with three others behind her, a neutral femme Killjoy recognized from her first encounter, the one she had stabbed in the shoulder, was propped up between two Autobot medics.

"We're ready!" Vibes declared, and though she sounded normal her voice was louder, as if she had yelled across the room.

Killjoy nodded, switching tracks back to the main problem and putting the Red Alert problem on the back burner. "Right, so everyone grab the person nearest you. We all need to be in contact with each other for this to work. No matter what happens, don't let go of anyone. Grab onto two people, like a chain of links, so that when you let go of one you still have the other to anchor you." Her optics turned to Vibes and Strongarm. "You both will grab hold of me, and two others will grab hold of you, and so on and so forth. I can't bring you into the Shadowzone if you aren't connected to me and I can bring you out if you let go for whatever reason."

The two leaders nodded and double checked the line to make sure everyone had a firm hold and had two people touching them at all times. It created a circle of mecha grabbing each other by the arm or shoulder, and Killjoy thought it was odd that no one grabbed each others hands. Both leaders gripped her by the elbow, and she activated her phase shifter.

Her energon pump gave a start when the world shifted sluggishly to dull gray, while the Autobots retained their distinct colors of oranges, blues, reds, purples and yellows. A few of them were looking around at the strange world in awe, but Killjoy forcibly pushed thoughts of their wonderment aside as she prepared for the floor to rapidly come up to meet them. In seconds, she dropped through the ground, for a moment tugging on the mech next to her before the call of gravity caused them all to fall through the floor.

Her sensors registered the ground first, informing her phase shifter that that wasn't something it should phase through. Reality shifted once more so that their pedes were once again tangible, allowing them to walk unseen across the uneven terrain.

Killjoy paused at the edge of the clearing, optics narrowed at the ground as she recognized nearly invisible pedeprints that had crushed the grass stalks. They were headed directly in the direction of Airachnid's base. Feeling a hand tighten on her elbow, she shook herself and kept going, making sure that her phase shifter only recognized the ground as an anchor into the real world.

"Wha-a-a-t i-i-is th-i-i-is?"

The question was made all the stranger by the simple fact that the person speaking was obviously not stuttering. She glanced backwards and surveyed the crew of Autobots, intending to check their coloration in order to determine who was still in the same dimension as she. Instead, she found herself staring beyond them towards the ship. Or where the ship was a klik ago.

A shock wave rippled across the forest but she didn't noticed it at all, unaffected by the onslaught of invisible force. It was the rumbling noise which she heard, distinct and loud even while in the cloak of the phase shifter. The Autobots gripped each other tightly, braced for impact but feeling next to nothing as the invisible force sent cold shivers through their bodies. Relief spread through them rapidly when they realized they were safe.

Vibes looked expectantly at Killjoy. "He-e-e-ey, me-e-e-ech," she said, unaware of the stutter in her own voice.

"There seems to be a communication issue," she responded, earning a shocked look from Vibes. "We will continue onward until it is safe to drop the phase shifter. Come, and don't let go."

She twisted her arms, not dislodging any of them, and grabbed their elbows to lock them both on her arms. She pulled them towards the alcove, stepping through the wall without even looking for the crack. She gathered the Autobots around her and double checked that they all were in the boundaries of the cave before releasing all of them. Staggering slightly as her enegy dropped, she sat down on the nearest boulder.

"Now we can talk," she said, sighing.

"Here," someone said, shoving an energon cube in her servo.

She accepted the cube and frowned at the taste. It tasted exactly like hers back on the ship. Perhaps all energon tasted alike?

"Thank you for back there," someone said, and Killjoy blinked up at Vibes. "You saved our lives."

"All life is precious," she responded, neglecting to mention her promise. "Besides, it was what I had been told to do, to an extent."

Vibes raised an optic ridge at her, but the relief in her frame spoke volumes. "Regardless, you have our thanks."

Killjoy nodded, and felt bothered when Vibes stepped away. "What about those who were missing? Re-I mean, Siren?"

"Who?" Vibes asked, confused.

Killjoy stared at her for a second, startled. "Red Alert?"

"Yes, he had disappeared before you came to speak with us," Vibes said. "We don't know where he went."

"You don't find it weird that Red Alert would disappear like this for no reason just before your base explodes?"

"No, but I trust him. He would have a reason for leaving."

Killjoy shook her helm, frustrated and standing up. "You're not getting it."

 _And she_ should _get it,_ she mused to herself _._ _Millions of years of war does that to mecha_. They become paranoid about making sure their comrades survived and part of that required them knowing about their comrade's personalities. Red Alert would have never left the base.

"Nevermind. I'll need another energon cube and then I'll find Red Alert."

"Our main priority should be the Neutrals right now."

Killjoy stared at Vibes. "No. _They've_ chosen their side. They're our responsibility now. You worry about surviving."

"The Neutral's are in danger, probably even tricked by Darklight. We have to help them."

"No. Allout and Darklight are bonded, Vibes. Allout might not be aware of Darklight's treachory but Darklight is certainly aware of Allout's hatred for Decepticons. Promises to defeat the Decepticon base here on Earth gave Allout the go ahead to leave you. If she's stupid enough to think she can attack the Decepticons and win, she can damn well take responsibility for protecting herself."

"This isn't right, Killjoy."

Killjoy shook her helm. "Stop. Enough of this." She walked away, glancing backwards at the Autobots. "That's thrice this has happened."

"Thrice what has happened?"

She glared at Vibes, furious with herself for not having recognized the signs before. "First, Strongarm here calls Red Alert a mech, when he is clearly a femme pretending to be a female. Second, you aren't paranoid about the fact that the most paranoid and protective person here is gone. Third, you just called me Killjoy."

"That's your name isn't it?"

"I notice how you haven't denied any of the other stuff," she bit back. "But, yes, Killjoy is my name. The problem is that it's my name in _English_ , not in Cybertronian. Even though it translated into Spoilsport, I always made sure that I said 'The Killer's Joy' when I said my name. I messed it up on purpose and here you are calling me by my name _in the right way,_ something impossible to do in Cybertronian."

Vibes took a step forward just as Killjoy took a step back.

"This is another of his simulations," she said, recounting the events back towards the beginning. "It's always been one of his simulations. How far has it come to?" She paused, furious with herself. "And how could I be so blind?"

"What are you talking about?" Vibes asked, confused.

"Never mind that," she snapped. "You and the other Autobots stay here. Or don't stay here. It probably never mattered anyway. I'm going after Red Alert. He's the only thing here that has come close to actually making any real sense."

Everything was being called into question now that she looked at it through the filter of her new knowledge. At every opportunity, when she got stuck in a bad situation, a new power would miraculously appear to save her – or help make things make sense. Her phase shifter. Her battle computer, or defense programming. Her EMP weapon. There were too many coincidences for any of it to be real.

She was currently living her dream, first by experiencing what it felt like to be in the body of a giant Cybertronian and then getting sucked into a new and wonderful adventure – emphasis on the new and less on the wonderful. Here, she could be a hero. She was being a hero.

But whoever had come up with this simulation obviously didn't understand what being a hero entailed. It didn't mean that they were being called to save someone at every opportunity – in fact, people of pride never asked for a hero to get them out of their situations, too blinded by their own belief that they could get them out of that situation themselves. That kind of arrogance got people killed, but was also necessary in certain circumstances. It told people that they had a reason to be arrogant, and it was easy to tell if it was just bravado or if they had the skills and experience and background to back it up.

Vibes wasn't arrogant when she should be arrogant. She was the least confident person to run the ship and yet somehow still exuded a confidence that made it seem like she belonged on the ship. She put people in their place, but she expressed none of the experience her position entailed.

This was a world designed to bend towards her fantasy and make her want to stay in it forever. It was built so that she wouldn't have any reason to question it, wouldn't have any reason to give up, and always kept going, creating a new situation at every beck and turn. It had all the earmarks of a dream, a perfect dream, one designed expressly for her.

Killjoy was fully aware of the fact that it had been working if not for her desire to learn more. She had wanted to know what was going on from the get go and used methods normal people don't think of in order to find that information. Most would have shied away from hacking into alien technology but she hadn't even batten an eyelash at the idea – she was too arrogantly confidence in her own blatant stupidity to _not_ do it.

The machine or whoever that created this simulation hadn't been expecting it. The _Him_ in Atlas' message. Not Megatron, not Optimus Prime, but someone else who was controlling the simulation.

She needed to speak with Red Alert to confirm her thoughts and that meant tracking down the lone mech through the woods to wherever it was that he had disappeared to.

"Wouldn't you need to go to your base to get energon for that?"

"And you aren't willing to offer up some of your own?" she snarled. "How _generous_ of you Autobots, especially considering that you probably won't be needing it for the duration of your stay." She turned on her phase shifter and quickly left them behind, not wanting to continue the discussion. Red Alert was more important right at that moment, for more than one reason.

She reached up to pass her servos through her hair, but instead found a chevron in her way and she tugged on it in frustration. The feeling was similar to when she ran her servo through her hair but off, which could be expected. She quickly forgot about it and started running through the forest, urged on by the desire to get this over with as soon as possible. To get back to reality and a family that was perhaps worried about her safety. If she even had a family to get back to and wasn't buried somewhere. She shuddered and pushed the thought aside, returning her full attention to rediscovering Red Alert's trail.

It was party of two mechs headed off away from the Autobot base and in the opposite direction of her own HQ, nowhere near the direction of the Decepticon base, zigzagging off into the forest. The trail was older than the one leading towards the Decepticon base, and she lost it multiple times through the forest, but keeping to a perfect zigzag pattern almost always managed to get her back on track. When she lost the trail and the pattern didn't make it appear, she backed up to the last place she spotted the trail and did a reverse zigzag to cover the ground. When that found nothing, she expanded her search parameters in a spiral. She rarely, if ever, lost the trail for too long. Once, she encricled an entire mountain to get the trail back.

Another time, she lost it for a full joor. But at the same time it felt as if no time had passed at all. Normally, long and tedious tasks bored her, but it seemed like time passed differenly here. It had happened before, back when she was trapped on the ship. As long as she had a task, she could push back her boredom. It begged the question why she wasn't able to do the same before going back to The Mentor and trying to answer questions. Did a part of her know that some of the answers lied there? The message, particularly? Perhaps going back would help her find the rest of the message, if there was more to it.

But that was a few days journey back. Whoever had taken Red Alert had made sure to take him a long ways away, which meant he was most likely still with him. There hadn't been enough time for him or her to rejoin Darklight.

Or there was something else going on. A glitch in the programming, or a purposefully long trail meant to shake her off or discourage her from continuing. Either it led to her waking up, or her dead, the latter of which might not be something the puppetmaster would want. Or perhaps there was another reason not commonly found in stories.

The semi-large army of Insecticon drones awaiting her arrival was a complete surprise. A silver femme stood among them, with the red and black femme she had come to know as Red Alert nowhere to be found.

"Airachnid thought you might show up," the femme called, her Autobot insignia flashing mockingly in the light. "Gigan."

 _Atlas_ , her processor corrected.

The last piece of the puzzle fell into place.


	14. Memory

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She finally escapes the Mentor's grasp, with help from a stranger and a mech named Atlas, who is the original Killjoy.

The army of Insecticons didn't phase her one bit. She didn't even deign them the honor of beating the crap out of them. She just turned on her phase shifter and ran.

It was a simple theory; the farther away from the epicenter of the nightmare she went, the close she was to escaping it. There had to a be a boundary somewhere and with most of the simulation focused around the story of Darklight and Airachnid, she didn't think the creator of it was smart enough or well-versed enough to add on to it without some inconsistency. When she glanced back, she realized that the Insecticons were lagging behind, as if she was going much faster than her top speed on pedes. She didn't look the gift horse in the mouth and just kept on running.

Until she ran into a wall.

The wall was invisible and beyond the horizon she could still see trees running off in every direction, and a patch of land completely clear of trees off to the right, beneath the height of a familiar mountain. This was where the memory fueled fantasy came to an abrupt end, and when she looked back at the Insecticons, she understood why. A mech she hadn't met before had turned around to attack the Insecticons, his Praxian style-chest and hexagonal chevron down to the black and white orca-style paint-job reminded her of her own reflection, and his heavily-armored gatling gun style shoulder cannons blitzing the army of flying Insecticons.

The grey femme was standing in the back of the pack, ducking behind cover she obviously didn't know how to properly use as she tried to stay out of sight. She maneuvered around to behind him, a familiar dirk glowing blue in her arm as she struck out, but a flick of his doorwings was the only warning she got before she found the blade imbedded in her back, arm twisted and snapped at the joint. The Insecticons swarmed at the temporary distraction, and he started running again, and Rhythm paused before running after him even as he transformed into hovercraft mode. She kept up easily, with him, watching as artillery weapons unfolded from his alternate mode and aimed at the Insecticons, though didn't fire until he occasionally jumped out of phase.

The invisible wall seemed to have disappeared, allowing her to keep going. Or perhaps the illusion had moved but the wall was still there? Thinking about it was going to give her a helmache. She shook it off and kept running.

Except the more she run, the more the simulation seemed to be getting itself back to how it was originally. She forced herself to stop and watched the phantom mech, who had momentarily disappeared, keep running off in that direction. She instead turned diagonally away from him and walked away, keeping her sensors trained on the Insecticons as they disappeared. It didn't take her long to find the wall again.

Around her, without a memory to feed off of, the whole place was starting to become still. Trees stopped moving, wind stopped blowing, and the grass stopped swaying. It reminded her of being in the cave and listening to the drop of water, endless and, if she thought about it, unrealistic for a cave. Where were the bats? After all, if there were fish there were going to be a number of other creatures. Where were the squirrels and deer and insects? When she hadn't been looking for them, they weren't there to see.

And the rapid transition of the sea from pool-like appearance to being in salt water, but she hadn't thought twice on it, thinking that it just confirmed her religion. Now, she couldn't help but think about it. Almost like she had arrived before the phantom person had arrived in the room, and therefore there wasn't any memory of what the sea had been like before and her own experiences of being at the Zoo and see underwater footage had filled in the blanks. Up until the point where his memory kicked in and overrode it.

It was more subtle than the blatant under developed characters that had fallen into the simulation - or perhaps, they were developed but the person running the whole simulation didn't understand people enough to make them react properly to whatever she was saying or doing at the time. After all, Vibes should have a reason for not listening to a stranger on the planet. Killjoy couldn't believe that Vibes was that incompetent of a Sub-Commander to not be able to command or manipulate the Neutrals, or even recognize Darklight as a threat while he was underneath her very olfactory sensors. It had a case of very bad fanfiction writing, especially since Vibes and Red Alert were canon, the later of whom seems contrary to his 'suspicious of everyone' personality. Too many things were not making sense.

But that didn't explain everything. Why trap her, a human, in this simulation? What was she forgetting? She remembered getting hit by the car, but she had blacked out before anything else happened. She couldn't remember being put in an ambulance or being taken to the hospital. And what happened to her sister?

An image of Rhyme sitting back at base, lying down in her Seeker regalia, purple and blue, feminine frame, optics offline and spark bond unresponsive flashed through her processors. The reminder of the spark bond made her touch her chest. Her spark didn't hurt anymore whenever she thought of her sister. Was this also in tune with someone else's memory? No, she felt this was not the case. Her sisters existed; it was embedded deep within her coding to be a part of a gestalt team and they were the only ones besides her mother and father who she could put Cybertronian names to - though whether that was also a part of the simulator's meddling was up for debate.

Which all led up to one very important question; what does she need to do in order to wake up?

The only thing that came to her mind was falling. It was a sensation that seemed to work in dreams to wake them up, though whether it might work in this simulation was something she felt she could risk testing out.

She headed towards the nearest mountain that the invisible wall would allow her to get to and found herself back at the alcove. She climbed to the top of the sheer rock face and jumped off it.

If he had a body, he would be tapping his denta right now.

He had given up on any hope of wresting the simulation back under his control. It was better to see it play out anyway, to watch as all his carefully constructed programming was painstakingly torn apart so he could make a newer and better simulation in which to trap her within, one which she and everyone else would be unable to escape. If he failed, the alternative was too terrible to contemplate.

It was custom for the subject's own subconscious mind to fill in the blanks on certain details in the simulation - things he could not readily understand - but a lot of the recent population had become trapped in a memory simulation, the original copy of which did not come within his databanks. Fortunately, in most cases, the subconscious mind filled in the blanks from there, making the subject unaware that they were living someone else's memories and making them fully believe that they were in charge of their own actions, even justifying out-of-character moments. However, in this instance, Rhythm's subconscious had transformed during the conversion process into a battle computer, acting in place of one and deconstructing the simulation as it happened. It wasn't filling in the blanks like it normally did, causing the characters in the simulation to resort to default actions that only worked in the original simulation.

He didn't have enough information on emotions to fill in the blanks for her, and his own involvement had only solved half the problems before they could happen. Even though, regardless of his species' cold and emotionless nature, they did have an emotional center, but it was designed to absorb emotions from the Students and charges they collected and converted over the years. Hatred and Love had been the only two he ever picked up, and he had forestalled his emotional center from ever picking up more, rerouting the information within his own mind. It was a way to keep in control of his emotional center, though he saw she was correct when it came down to it. One could not properly simulate emotions without first understanding what those emotions were, and Rhythm herself seemed incapable of understanding them fully herself. Perhaps he could store the information outside of his emotional center's reach, to forestall him developing anymore, and allow him to fill in the blanks when subconsciousness transformed into battle computers.

When he stepped back in order to fully understand exactly how she was managing to destroy his simulation, no longer able to physically get involved without seriously tipping her off and ruining the point of his newfound exercise, he realized that part of the problem lay in the physical world. Someone had a hold on her Vehicon husk and was using it to contact her Pretender body. He determined that it would solve matters if he just sent one of the already converted to physically connect with her body and allow the Hivemaster a direct doorway into her mind and cut off her connection to the compromised Vehicon. She would not die, but be forced to become a Targetmaster or Headmaster, both of which he could deal with in the long term and neither would cause his original programming to go haywire.

He sent his plans in motion and sat back to wait.

True to form, it didn't work.

She had never really fallen from any height before, so the sensation of falling couldn't be replicated. It hurt like hell when she broke her already injured shoulder, but it was otherwise a pointless waste of time. That left her with little else to work with. She could read from a datapad just fine, and even if she couldn't it wouldn't have helped her wake up. She contemplated attacking Airachnid while the true memory went... wherever he was going. Then again, if he had confronted Airachnid like she planned on doing, then it might just skip straight to that part of his memory.

Ugh, trying to work around something she didn't have any knowledge of how it worked was impossible. It made her want to just bash the place and destroy her HQ, though she wasn't entirely how she'd pull it off and had little to no desire to go through with it.

But perhaps that's what she should be doing? Destroying the only thing she knows has been here since the beginning seemed like a good place to start to tear this dream apart. With nothing to work from, the simulation might be unable to carry on. Plan in hand, she decided to enact it, though perhaps without going anywhere where the Mentor could stop her. She didn't know how much the memory had to work with when it came to the very thing which had probably trained or manipulated Atlas into doing anything in this memory.

It was a start and she wasn't about to back out of it just because she had some uncertainties of the outcome. She just lacked the ranged ammunition to get the job done, and she knew exactly where she could swipe it from, too.

After all, simulations, Autobots or otherwise, wouldn't be needing their energon cubes or their weaponry. And she didn't even have to feel guilty about not asking them for it.

The conversion process was simple.

It didn't matter if the organic subject was dead or alive; as long as it had a spark residue while it lived and continued to have it even partway after death, it could be converted. Approximately fifty percent of the missing and twenty percent of the dead had been converted. They became his Students and Charges, sometimes even needing complete mental overhauls, their old memories repressed or outright deleted, especially in the case of some traumatic incidences. For some of the older Pretenders, it was necessary to completely mindwipe them because they were unable to cope with their new mental or physical bodies, after having lived lives without technology. It bothered his programming enough that he decided instead to simply trap them into a simulation and make them live out whatever fantasies they desired. That only changed recently with the invention of the Internet and the growing population of non-Terrans currently living on Earth, where being trapped in old fashion dreams or even modern ones were impractical and increasingly difficult. Perhaps the organics had developed a resistance to his conversion techniques when he wasn't looking?

Out of all the borderline millions of humans that had been transformed into Pretenders, 99.99% were trapped forever and safe in his simulation. A few had escaped, while yet others had never been under a Hivemaster's control to begin with and he suspected that they originated from the Mother Planet itself. He had learned from his mistakes before hand and this was no different.

Though the battle computer was new. It could have been a side-effect of the interference from the outside source. He had no way of really knowing, not without reawakening memories he had purposefully suppressed in her mind. It was psychologically safer for her that she didn't know about them.

The Vehicon didn't take long to arrive on scene. It was disguised as local law enforcement and it would take a while for the police to even receive reports of someone pretending to be an officer roaring through downtown Germantown. The grave yard was unguarded this late at night by the natives. At least, the Vehicon wasn't detecting any organic spark signatures on site.

He immediately became aware of the Cybertronian's presence.

She looked out over the underwater sea, eyeballing the distance between herself and the pile of energon cubes waiting right underneath the Observation window, aiming with her pilfered rifle at the stack. Third time's a charm.

The shot was way off, again. It curved through the air at an unnatural anger. It could have been some form of physics she wasn't aware of, but it was more likely some meddling from the Puppetmaster. She would have to find some other way to detonate the energon stockpile.

She didn't want to consider possible suicidal avenues of detonation. Risking her own life, even in a simulation, might cause damage to her mentally, even if not physically, and that would seriously impede her in the long run. She didn't want to go inside the ship to alert the Mentor, if he wasn't already aware of what was going on, so shooting the energon stockpiles from the inside was a big no-no. That left her with some type of time explosive, something which the Autobots weren't willing to share.

Or...

She half-walked, half-swam back to the small pile energon and carefully created a trail away from the main stash, not wanting to cause a chain reaction too early. She shifted nervously beside a rise in the ground, ready to dodge behind it the moment she actually hit the energon cube a several meters in front of her.

Killjoy still couldn't hit the broadside of a barn, but her chances of pulling this off had greatly increased.

The Cybertronian was an experienced fighter, but that was to be expected.

The last time the Hivemaster had been on Cybertron, the war between the Primes and the Vehicon Armada had just been ending. It's only logical that they would have been adamant about the next series of Primes being warriors, prepared to rise up and defeat enemies on par with what they had to face with The Fallen's betrayal. Even though this Cybertronian was no Prime, he perhaps was trained or being trained by one in order to become his temporary replacement should the Matrix not immediately chose a Prime from the current generation. What were they called then? Lord Protectionaters or something.

He didn't care for the way the Cybertronian was delaying his progress. The Vehicon minion was reduced to scrap rather quickly, and the Hivemaster decided to navigate a few of his Converted in the mech's direction. If a few Insecticon clones decided to tag along, well, the more the merrier. He wasn't all that particular about collateral damage, and if Rhythm herself died in the process then it not only would have solved his current problem but drawn out two others he could observe and deal with later.

The graveyard was unattended so late at night, except for one night guard whose presence was lacking. Hivemaster guessed that the Cybertronian had purposefully led him away and perhaps trapped him so that he had no way of getting back in time to see the battle. It might mean that the police arrived in a short while. The Hivemaster didn't care.

The Cybertronian was distracting. His mottled gray paint-job was good camouflage on Cybertron but not on Earth. It reflected the moon's light like a beacon, lacking any subtlety of any sort. He couldn't hide and he couldn't survive the approaching army of vehicons.

Like a fool, he had turned his attention away from Rhythm.

Imagine for a moment a bundle of nerves knotted up in the center of your brain, like a cramped muscle that no one is able to massage. Then, suddenly, someone does figure out a way to massage those muscles - and in one single moment, your head if full of intense and unexplained pain, before everything suddenly relaxes. That's what it felt like to Rhythm when she blew up the Decepticon HQ. That knot in her head, known as a Hivemaster, had suddenly been exorcised in such startling efficiency that it left both of their core processors ringing.

The next thing the Hivemaster knew was that his vehicon troopers were being systematically taken out by Insecticon larva clones, chewed into slag to be digested and tranformed into energy. They did not scream in pain, but Hivemaster felt their pain receptors spike for the few breems they were active while the larva swallowed them piece by piece. When his attention was finally free enough to return to attack the Cybertronian, he was already gone. The unburied grave was the only sign that he had ever been there.

He hated that.

The world was dark and made entirely of ones and zeroes. The illusions had fallen through and the illusionist's tricks weren't effective enough to drown her in another simulation. She was stuck in limbo, unable to access her real body or her real memories, waiting in a timeless void as something or someone carried her across unknown lands to her destination. The only connection she had to the outside world was the strange warm presence at the edge of her mind.

The true mind pulsed in surprise when she turned her attention to him from... whatever it was she had been doing before. He paused a long moment, long enough for her to return her attention to the information streaming in from her battle computer and carefully dodge yet another mental strike from the simulator. He watched in fascination almost, before she felt him start to reach out with his thoughts towards her, curious and cautious.

'Can you hear me?'

She recognized the voice immediately. The sensation of knowing was weird and it was a lot like finally putting a face to one of the murmuring voices at the back of her processor. She hadn't realized until that moment that the voice hadn't been a part of her this entire time. 'Yes, I hear you just fine. Who are you?'

He paused again. 'I am Atlas.' A pause. 'You do not seem surprised.'

'You were the most likely to be you.' She found her own statement amusing but dismissed it quickly, returning her attention back to Atlas. 'Tell me how bad it looks out there. Am I likely to awaken anytime soon?'

'Yes, now that you are out of the simulation. The rest of the journey should be easy enough.' He paused, and she had the distinct impression that he was avoiding saying something. 'Did you receive my message?'

He sounded genuinely curious. She frowned, reviewing her memories. 'I did not receive all of it at once, but I remembered enough of it.'

'Better than most,' he breathed, relieved. He paused again, savoring the moment. 'Welcome back.'

The genuine compassion rippling through his mind threw her off. She hadn't felt real compassion in however long she had been in the simulation, and a little longer still. Before all this had happened, she had few friends, none of whom lived at the college she was at, and she had no one to hang out with on a regular basis. Her sister had been pretty much it, and she was at a neighboring college some fifteen minutes drive away. She didn't know how to respond or what emotion she should be feeling, and that made her uncomfortable. She decided to switch topics.

'I'm still confused on how I got stuck here. Do you know anything about what happened to me before this?'

'No, sadly, I don't. You are the first one I've run into that has regained consciousness.'

Her mind pulsed in surprise. 'There are others like me?'

'Yes,' he said, sadness coloring his mind. 'None of them with battle computers, however, so it's nearly impossible for them to get out even with my message battering at their subconsciousness.'

'I'm confused about that myself, sir. As far as I know, I shouldn't have one myself.' She paused, watching as self-diagnostic systems awoke and began feeding her information. She understood little if none of it and dismissed it after she started to get confused. Atlas' mind had gone quiet, musing, when she returned her attention to him. 'Sir?'

'Hm? Oh, nothing,' he shifted mentally. 'What's the last thing you remember?'

'Before this, sir?' A nod. 'I was dead, sir.'

The stillness from his mind might have been alarming if she had been given any time to think about it. He was watching her with scrutiny, as much as a mind could watch another mind.

'What do you mean by dead?'

'I mean that my last moments before this whole thing started,' she mentally gestured around them, 'I was in the medical ward and my... spark casing... was damaged almost beyond repair.' She didn't know why she put it into Cybertronian terms. It just felt right.

Stillness had entered his mind again. 'Your spark casing?' his voice didn't reflect the turmoil of emotions and sympathies spreading through the hard link. She decided to ignore the confusing jungle of emotions and focus on his question.

'Yes, my spark casing. I had recently got into an accident which caused me to sustain irreparable damage in my... chassis and torso. I believe it was shortly after my arrival at the medical ward that my spark gave out.'

A pause. 'I am sorry.'

She had the distinct impression that he wasn't just apologizing about the fact that she had died. She hated it when people felt sorry for her, especially when she didn't know why. 'Don't mention it,' she responded awkwardly.

An awkward silence settled between them, and she had no idea how to cure it. Only in dreams did she know how to really resolve these kind of situations; by utterly avoiding them. In reality, they tended to happen a lot. She hated it because she had no idea how to deal with it. It wasn't something she could fix.

A pulse of worry extended from Atlas' mind but she dismissed it. 'I'm fine.' She looked back at the simulator but it seemed preoccupied with something elsewhere. 'Can you get me out of here?'

A pulse of uncertainty. 'I don't know. I haven't reached this point before with the others.'

She nodded quietly, as much as a mind could nod. Her thoughts turned elsewhere as memories resurfaced. 'The others? Can you tell me what they look like?'

He seemed aware of her memories of her sister and semi-apologetically sent an image of the others. There were five in all and she knew immediately which one was hers, even though they all looked startlingly alike. Hers was the only one with a black and white paintjob, while everyone else was a purple and black and looked surprisingly like vehicons from Transformers Prime - a thought which immediately perked Atlas' interest.

'You recognize them?'

'Not really.' It was going to be a bother having him in her head and being able to read her impulses like this. 'They remind me of something else.'

A pause and confusion. She realized that he hadn't actually meant the question that way.

'You haven't told me your name,' he said, mostly to change the subject.

She felt like she had just been called out on her faux pas even though she knew he didn't mean it that way. 'Sorry. Name's Rhythm.' She almost called herself Killjoy, but last minute remembered that she was speaking to the aboriginal Killjoy. 'How many others were trapped in your memories?'

'Only everyone I've run into, or so I'm assuming. I guess I leave more of an impression than I would like,' he said, half-joking and half-serious. 'I forgot to ask. How are you?'

'Well enough.' She frowned. 'How are you? Vibes?' She paused. 'Reverb?'

'Alive and well,' he said. 'Though I'm surprised you'd ask about Reverb.'

'Why?'

'You seemed to hate him. A lot.'

'Hate is a strong word there, sir. I might have killed him in the simulation but that doesn't mean I hate him. Especially since his death wasn't in my control at the time.'

He was going to argue the point, probably going to say something about how her battle computer had specifically targeted him, before realizing that was probably not something he should bring up, especially when he could tell just by a cursory glance that she didn't remember half the things her battle computer did to bring her of the simulation. Instead, he focused on the small sliver of guilt curling through her mind. 'You still blame yourself for his death?'

'Yes,' she said, pausing to gather her thoughts to explain. 'I believe that without laws and substance our species as a whole cannot reach beyond our mental and physical boundaries. It is an orderly system which creates the education systems and jobs. Whenever someone breaks a law or attempts to work around the system, it's purpose can no longer fulfill it's definitive roles. To murder someone before they go to trail is just as much a transgression as killing them in their own abode for no good reason. Certainly, self-defense allows some leeway in this matter, but when you have the skills and experience that far exceed your enemy's, it's more likely that you can win without causing them to lose their sparks and it becomes your fault if they die by your hand.' She paused, sighing. 'In the instance of Reverb's death, it's arguable that I knew exactly what I was doing and what I had, in essence, is committed premeditated murder, even if I cannot remember my exact reasoning for it. I was using my own skills to my advantage to eliminate someone who the law hadn't given me the right to execute.'

The familiar stillness settled over his mind. But she ignored it, allowing him some privacy and... perhaps adjusting to the stillness. She expected it would happen often between them.

'You are... very mature for one so young.'

'I believe the Mentor shares your sentiments.'

'The Mentor?'

She didn't say anything.

'You call him that? Why?'

'I try not to think about it.'

He seemed uncomfortable. 'I'm sorry.'

'It's not your fault.'

'No, I should have done more to bring you out sooner. There's no telling what that AI has done to you or attempted to do to you - without you sharing at least, but from what I understand your culture doesn't do that. It's not natural, what he's done. I should have done more.'

She paused. 'You can't do what you don't know to do.'

A pause.

'Besides, I wasn't talking about that. I was talking about my death. I don't think anyone could have predicted it, except God himself, so it can't be anyone's fault. I do not regret anything.'

He was hiding something, but the notion disappeared quickly. He was relieved and confused, a tendril of guilt curled deep within his mind. She kept silent on it, not wanting to pry.

'I will try my best to awaken you as soon as possible.'

She knew a farewell when she heard it but the sudden silence of him leaving her mind left her feeling staggered. She was so used to someone or something being there, watching her, and she wasn't sure if the darkness of her mind was a good thing or not. But, considering the company she had kept in the last however long it was the Mentor had her, she decided that it was a good thing.

Darkness, loneliness and silence were better than the alternative. Perhaps it was her time spent using the phase shifter, but she found herself feeling more secure right now than when Atlas had been here.


	15. Still Alive

When she woke up, she thought for a moment she was back in the past, back when she was a toddler when the lull of the engine of the car would always put her to sleep on the long journeys up north to her grandfather's house. A nine hour drive was exciting, but while her sister stayed awake throughout the night, conquering the required sleeping hour, she found herself drifting off to sleep against her wants to do so.

She always found herself alone the very next day, as both her parents and her sister all fell instantly asleep when they arrived, leaving her bored and with nothing to do but watch television and pray that the old dog they had at the time did something interesting. Perhaps it was her loneliness which gave her the observation skills she would later abandon over the years after those very same skills helped her to not only predict the old dog's death but also to have nightmares about said death, and the death of the other family members, up until the poor dog actually died. She had sworn quickly afterwards that she would protect her sister and her family at any and all cost, even if that meant pretending to be someone she was not.

If people thought she was smart, she had to pretend otherwise. Her grades suffered because of this and it was a wonder how she managed to get into college in the first place. Then again, it wasn't so much a wonder; she couldn't really protect her sister while sitting at home and twiddling her thumbs. No, she decided, the plan was to be with her sister, her tenderhearted and often too-soft-for-her-own-good sister, no matter the costs. She had on desire to let anyone take advantage of her sister, and if that meant being her business manager then so be it. She wouldn't have her sister turn out like her mother, a woman who loved to do something but was so burned out that it was near impossible for her to do anything outside of surfing the web and researching.

But then she remembered that she was dead, or was dying, and that she shouldn't be in a car at all. It had not been a part of the plan to die, but at the same time it was a means to achieve the goal she had promised to keep ever since she watched her mom's old dog's life slip away there on the medical table, the confusion on the poor pup's face as her limbs refused to obey her controls and the fear of being in a place no dog wanted to be.

After living through that nightmare, she hadn't wanted to observe the world so closely again, afraid to see the look on her mother's face and her father's face as she slipped away, or the doctors dispassionate face as he slowly sucked the life out of one of her only friends in the world. No dream ever compared to that nightmare, and in that way she _didn't_ have nightmares. Only daymares in the form of life. People who didn't realize the pain they were causing others, and to some extent herself. She wanted to feel the pain rather than watch someone else suffer it - and she grew to believe that she deserved it.

Then she remembered her last moments of being alive, the one that she had forgotten, been forced to forget, so that she would perhaps not be so suicidal. It was a moment of peace. For once in her life, she'd be able to join old Georgia and tell her that she had been murdered by a incompetent doctor who didn't understand what a mercy killing was. She had always imagined that she'd be able to speak with all the animals while in heaven. That was a reward in of itself.

And she was disappointed that she hadn't gotten to go. Disappointed that she had been brought back to a world in pain because people couldn't see the pain they caused everyone around them.

The car was dark inside, the windows heavily tinted almost to the point of being illegal, and all the black leather squeaked and smelled. She lifted a hand to her eyes, watching her reflection in the mirror. She was covered in grime and dirt, like some physical manifestation of a corpse, except all her skin was intact and her eyes glowed a strange blue-green. Strange because the light looked almost red in the light. Perhaps when it was pitch black, her eyes would glow red, but with light reflecting off the iris, the sinister beams were carefully hidden behind blue-green lenses meant to look like her original eye color.

She didn't care that she had become an abomination or cyborg or whatever. That didn't matter to her at all. She was emotionally drained, all the anger that had built up over the years at the people who refused to see the pain they caused, and at herself for becoming like one of those people who dished out pain like it was cafeteria servings. She made others suffer while also psychologically torturing herself.

She felt emotionally dead, lingering spells of disappointment sinking her into a depression. A depression further unaided by the withering voice in the back of her head, the one she knew was nothing more than a manifestation of her own disgust, directing further helpings of worthlessness onto her.

_You don't deserve a happy ending._

But while it constantly blathered on and on, she found herself largely unaffected by it. She knew, as a kid, that people would never appreciate her for what she tried to do, but she promised to do it anyway. Because no one else would. It was a responsibility that she grudgingly accepted, even though she'd hate and avoid it for her latter teenage years.

It still hurt to think about. She just wasn't emotionally invested enough in life right now to cry.

She just wanted to world to stop moving. Everything needed to stop. It wouldn't stop, though, but she could bring herself to turn away from it as it moved on. Last time she did that, she could no longer pay attention to details. She avoided them like the plague, afraid to see pain and suffering and _death_ in the actions of the people around her. But just because she consciously refused to see it, that didn't mean her subconscious wasn't keeping track of it. All her friends had problems, suffered from those problems, and she had been their friend regardless, because it had been the only thing of herself she knew how to give. Even before she had started becoming so introverted after Georgia's death, she had continued to collect those poor, forgotten and abused friends who were lonely and didn't know how to ask for someone to be with them. It was the only thing she had left to give; a moment of her time. Because, on the inside, a part of her had died with Georgia. That part of her that had wanted to keep living.

Why then, had Mentor named her after this desire to keep going? It made no sense. Rhythm was the name of someone who was unstoppable, but the person who she had become on her nineteenth birthday hadn't had the willpower to live for herself. She lived for everyone else. And when she had finally met death, it had been robbed from her.

_Don't I deserve peace? Could you have at least given me that much?_

The universe didn't give her an answer.

She didn't know how long she had been in the car before her attention was drawn to the motion on the screen in the center of the dashboard. A face appeared, which looked oddly familiar, but she couldn't summon up any desire to recognize it.

"You look like slag," he began, speaking fluent Cybertronian and sounding slightly unsure of himself. "Listen, uh, I know you're awake."

While she deliberated on whether or not to speak to him, her silence made him uncomfortable. She couldn't bring herself to care in that moment, because she was currently making a decision about whether or not she should speak to him. Then again, she wasn't sure her human body was capable of the electronic sounds necessary for Cybertronian languages.

"Uh, I'm sorry about earlier." _Earlier?_ "I was being a bit reckless. Atlas and Darklight kept telling me that it was dangerous to drive but I, uh, don't listen." _Darklight?_ "It's the first time I've been in a rain that doesn't try to kill me, y'know?" _Acid rain. Right._ "Are you okay?"

She realized belatedly that she had been nodding and stopped. Perhaps the motion was strange for Cybertronians or perhaps her silence was just too unnerving. She nodded again, staring at his screen face while avoiding his optics. Burning blue optics stared back, unnerved and strangely familiar, and she tried not to imagine him with a mottled gray paintjob, like Cybertronian camouflage. _That_ mech was dead.

"Uhm, okay," he said. "Would it help if I said that I didn't know you were Cybertronian?" _Cybertronian?_

He paused. "Look, I think we got off on the wrong pede, here." _We did?_ "My designation's Reverb."

Her body had simply stopped moving. A sneaking suspicion had started to from at the corner of her mind and it made her sick and fascinated at the same time. Images of the time in the forest flashed through her mind. The first time she had attacked someone. Killed them.

_Had I known?_

"What's your designation?"

He was being friendly, nervously friendly, like he was afraid of rejection. She couldn't push the growing horror inside of her away enough to respond.

Had she known?

The question ate away at her mind because she knew the answer but didn't want to accept it. How could she? How could she attack and kill him in the simulation? Just moments ago, she was disappointed that she was alive, fraggit all.

"I-I..." How does one apologize for killing someone? Especially to the person she had, frankly, murdered in a knee jerk reaction? "I-I..."

"Are you glitched?" he asked, now worried about something else. "Please don't tell me your glitched. Atlas would have my engine for his trophy room. If Primes even have trophy rooms."

God, if it had been anyone else who had put her into that simulation, would she have even gotten out of it to begin with? If it hadn't been for him putting her there, that knee jerk reaction would never have happened and the entire thing would have played out much more true to course and she'd never have known it was a dream. It wasn't because she was smart and that her battle computer had been fighting it from the get go - no, it had been because of that knee jerk that had first caused her to realize something was wrong and that caused her body to develop the simplistic battle computer in order to drive out the intruder. Perhaps, if not because of that knee jerk reaction, then she would have never gotten out. Because the Mentor would never have gotten involved, the battle computer wouldn't have formed, and she wouldn't have messed up the simulation so badly.

Did the Mentor know this?

"I-I'm sorry."

Now he was confused, his voice softening. "About what?"

She couldn't stop the tears started to leak down her face. She felt his whole body stiffen underneath her but she didn't care. "I'm sorry."

"Why are you leaking?"

She couldn't explain it to him. How she had killed him. The words caught in her throat in shame. She could only repeat the phrase over and over again as his own panic rose.

"I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry."

" _Why are you leaking!?_ "

* * *

Her parents' neighborhood was on top of two hills, with their house on the crest of one hill and another house with a half-wolf for a pet on top of the other. This did not reflect the condition of the house itself, which had many structural problems they tried to hide on a daily basis, the source of the problem being from extremely inexperienced builders from long before they had even considered buying the house. Last Rhythm remembered, her parents had a long list of what they expected structural wise for the next house they would be moving into, though since her death she wasn't sure if they had already moved there or not. She hoped not, because she had no interest in tracking down their records just to check up on them. She was, after all, dead in their eyes and appearing before them didn't seem like something that would come across well in any sense. No, they had already grieved for her, and now she only wished she could simply grief for them without having someone else bringing them back from the dead. Her family deserved rest when rest finally came to them.

After convincing Reverb that she was at least mostly fine - he wasn't at all convinced her 'leaking' was natural, - Rhythm found herself at her parents' house at the top of the hill. The Saturn View in the driveway was missing, and a quick scan of the garage indicated that both the Ford Mustang and the Saturn Outlook were also missing. There were only two people living in the house, and they used the Mustang to go anywhere. Not a single car shop was in walking distance, so that meant they weren't there. It gave the house the appearance of being abandoned, but most of the furniture was still around. A strange smell surrounded the backyard and after ringing the door bell, she decided to open the fence door to investigate it. It was never locked because there were usually two small black demon dogs running around in the backyard, barking or biting at any stranger with guts to walk through the gate. They were taken inside when someone did the lawn in the back. A brown well-trodden path led to the back porch, which was never clean of the pile of leaves. No one in the family saw any point in cleaning up what no one else ever saw and what would be covered by leaves again within the next six months. The Ferris family didn't waste time on aesthetics.

Rhythm felt the seams in finger expand as a delicate and oddly shaped contraption extended into the backdoor lock, and she watched it and felt the weight of the lock as it turned open, allowing her to step through. No one was home; her initial scans detected no life signs whatsoever and Reverb had told her the same. Were the dogs being taken to the vet?

The interior was much like the exterior. The Ferris family had few guests outside of close knit family, and though her grandmother disapproved of the aesthetics, her mother wasn't interested in changing the decor. It was plain, with odds and ends lying around to look decorative even though they often had no rhyme or reason for being in the kitchen or the living room. Three tray tables were filled with various items in the living rooms, sitting up next to the elbow shaped couch and within easy reach. An old fashion TV stand, huge and with lots of doors both wooden and glass, held a modern HD TV. There was a pool room immediately to her right, with walls lined in DVD and Blu-Ray shelves and a large doggie kennel in the corner. Clumps of black and gray dog hair were bundled up in the corners, crunched pecan shells lying all over the floor from where the dogs had brought them in from the backyard, and surprisingly no visible stains on the tan carpet floor. She moved her search to upstairs, headed for the most familiar part of the whole house; her room.

And it was here that the otherwise perfectly familiar house became distinctly strange and unfamiliar. Her bedroom was still there, but all her business binders and decorative crates had been packed and organized to be shuffled away while her bedroom itself had been turned into a guest bedroom with her desk and glass cabinet in the corner missing. The room felt empty without them and the newly vacuumed rug, something which had been a pet peeve of hers because of the rest of the house, seemed almost unnatural considering she had not been the last one in the room. Her parents had started to move on, putting her stuff in the attic or perhaps even selling them. Even her favorite stuffed animal was gone. It hurt to see evidence of life having moved on without her but she knew it was better this way. Retreating from the sight of her most sacred sanctum vandalized, she returned back downstairs to investigate the other half of the house.

But that's when she realized that something else was off with the house. Everywhere she went, the strange smell which had surrounded the backyard had invaded into the corners of her parents' and her sister's bedroom. The very source was two very familiar black mini-dogs, gutted from nose to stomach and with two dark stains beneath their frozen half-curled bodies. She couldn't bring herself to gag at the smell or sight; a part of her had expected that, too.

She checked the refrigerator and discovered everything rotten or moldy, the milk being the only thing that still smelled good. It was still cold in the refrigerator which meant the power company hadn't yet called in for someone to pay the bills or send someone to check out the house. More than two weeks but not longer than a month. One and half months after she had died and been laid to rest.

 _Do my parents' have gravestones?_ she wondered, then realized that they probably didn't. She left the house quickly after that, closing and locking the back door and rushing over to Reverb, her face stony and silent. He shifted uncomfortably as the casseticon-sized bot in human synthetic clothing and skin climbed into his front seat, but she ignored his discomfort.

"I need you to take me to Nashville," she instructed, absentmindedly putting on the seat belt out of habit. "Where... I died."

He didn't ask for where the exact streets were; they both knew that he knew very well where she had been hit.

"Would you like anything on the way?" he asked politely, sounding suspiciously like he was walking on glass.

She shook her head. "No, I don't think food or sleep will be an issue with my new body." She paused and glanced out the window. "And using my credit card account now will be stupid. My assets were probably frozen after my death and there is nothing in the world currently under my name." She did not want to think about the house she was leaving behind. In a few short weeks, no one would own that house either, except the government. "We should swing by Kristina Zortman's house before we get too far from German town. She's my grandmother."

Reverb silently adjusted his course and in thirty minutes they did a drive-by through her grandmother's neighborhood, watching in silence as car-less empty house swarmed with police officers. Kristina was the step-grandmother, the only one who visited her house regularly and who demanded semi-regular visits from practically everyone. Her house was pristine, her lawn well groomed, and her bushes well tended. She was also the only one in the family who had friends outside the family she visited on a regular basis and doctor appointments she attended nearly every month. It was only natural that her disappearance would be registered first. In a few days, the police would launch another investigation into the disappearance or deaths of her parents. She wondered how many people she knew had also disappeared and who was to blame. Her money was on The Mentor.

They returned to the road and headed towards her sister's college. Vanderbilt was normally a three hour drive away, but thanks to the somewhat hurried pace of Reverb, who seemed to be expecting some sort of terrible storm to surge up and out of his own chassis at any moment, they arrived there in two and avoided all the cops in the process. When they started entering semi-familiar territory, Rhythm finally approached the idea of conversation.

"Do you know... what happened to me?"

A disconcerting silence filled the transformer. She tilted her head in silent confusion before she realized what might have stopped him.

"I don't care about who killed me," she said, though she wasn't sure she was being honest with herself. "I want to know what happened to my body. There's science and history here that I need to know about."

"...right, uh," he paused, unable to form words. "How much are you aware of?"

"Besides the fact that it was you who hydroplaned into me?" She realized that she actually wasn't upset about it. The car flinched at her accusation, but she couldn't bring herself to care about it. "And the simulation in my head was run by some kind of A.I., little to nothing."

"Okay," he said. "Well, a friend of mine landed on this planet over one hundred stellar cycles ago. His name is Atlas Prime, and he used to be a powerful and loyal member of some... very bad mecha." He paused, gathering his thoughts. "He secreted away from our homeworld an artifact that was believed to be very powerful, but while here on Terra he discovered that it was merely an ancient librarian database containing knowledge about the universe and much of its secrets. It wasn't until he met your Guardians, the faction we call Omnibots, that he was able to communicate with the A.I. that runs the librarian database and it explained to us the concept of a Hivemaster.

"Before my own arrival on this planet, your Guardians went and fought against creatures known as Vehicons, an army of mindless creatures orchestrated by the Hivemaster. The Vehicons are much like sparkeaters" - she heard the terror in his voice but remained silent as he continued -"they seek forms of organic life with spirits that manifest in the form of distorted spark signatures. Your Guardians did not believe that it was natural for these creatures to consume your kind - so little that there was back then - and they decided to put a stop to it. When it became apparent that they could not restore you to human form, they destroyed the humans before they could be further converted and thus put under the Hivemaster's control. What was created from these half-dead and half-distorted creatures were... uh." He stopped altogether.

She waited patiently for him to continue before realizing he wasn't going to. "Well?" Her word didn't have the same bite she was used to, but she decided that was a good thing. It sounded almost dead, though, as if she really didn't care if he continued with his explanation or not.

"W-well, uh, the Guardians died. Atlas Prime decided to put it upon himself to protect this planet and he managed to somehow hack the Hivemaster's control over the remaining Vehicons, was unable to destroy the remaining abominations, and finally secluded himself from the in hopes that they would eventually run out of energy. They no longer hunted the distorted spark signatures, you see, and were starting to go after fully formed sparks. The Vehicons under Atlas' control went into stasis and became, basically, protoforms and therefore utterly harmless, allowing Atlas to study them. Soon thereafter, Atlas managed to recover the bodies of your Guardians while out searching for the abominations, and he hid them in his ship here on Terra.

"About forty nine stellar cycles ago, another loyal follower of the bad mecha" - she was beginning to think that he was refusing to say the word because of his own attempt to join them - "came to Earth and discovered the existence of these abominations. She found Atlas in the Omnibot stronghold and demanded that he give over the artifact, but he refused and she hacked into the computer database in an attempt to discover where it was and instead found his research on the Vehicon phenomenon, as Atlas calls it, and his attempts to recycle the Guardians. He escaped before she could kill him and headed back to his ship underwater. The Vehicon bodies were left behind, falling under Airachnid's control. She set about to changing their programming and sent them out to collect the abominations, which she then sicked on the rest of her crew. All but the Terrorcons died, and they became these terrible monsters with little to no brains...

"While Airachnid was busy repurposing the Vehicons and transforming them into her own army, Atlas Prime turned his attention to restoring the bodies of your Guardians. He recycled them, much in the same way the Council-" He bit his glossa and skipped ahead, while Rhythm logged that little tidbit away to investigate later. "Anyway, he managed to rebuild them, but without sparks they could not be whole again. Here his research came to an end."

He paused again, the face on his screen watching her with a frown, weighing her. She didn't notice, her eyes on the side of the highway. A familiar skeleton of a deer up the hill and just along the treeline told her that they were only half-way to Nashville.

"Then the Autobots came. He went out to warn them of the Insecticon threat which menaced the whole planet, but they didn't listen - or rather, Allout didn't. He was a tough, determined and headstrong mech and he was leader of the Neutrals. Even though Atlas was a Praxian and most of the Praxians had joined the Autobots-" He paused here to explain what a Praxian was, what happened to them, how they survived and how the Seekers and they had a less than pleasant rivalry thanks to what happened at the start of the war. "-Allout was still cynical about his cause. The she-mech he called his bondmate, Darklight, was an enygma. She didn't think one way or the other about it. Or so they all thought."

Rhythm was trying to digest the fact that the simulation had switched genders between Allout and Darklight, wondering if that was because Atlas or The Mentor saw one as being stereotypically more girly than the other. Just when she was starting to figure out that _she_ was the one who probably switched their sexes, Reverb decided he had paused long enough.

"I was a part of the Neutral crew that had come with Autobots," he explained reluctantly. "I was the one who went out into the forest and who triggered a perimeter alarm causing Atlas to investigate. I suppose you could say that it was because of me that he managed to get to the Autobots in time and... and because of me that he found out Darklight was a traitor, and so was Siren."

Rhythm tried not to look at Reverb, keeping a stoic front while watching the landscape whip passed. She understood now why Siren had been recast as the role of a canon character that would never become traitor to the cause, because in reality she had been the traitor Vibes had been keeping an optic on.

"But when Allout heard about the Decepticon's location, thinking Atlas accidentally slipped it to them, he decided to strike out and attack the base himself. While he was away, Darklight and Siren orchestrated the death of a Neutral Security Guard, someone who had discovered their plot to destroy the ship. Her name was Plasma, and well, uh." He paused again, before continuing. "Allout stuck the Decepticon HQ while Vibes organized the whole crew to go after them, leaving behind a scant few who would contact Optimus Prime if their mission failed or Vibes died. Along the way, Atlas stumbled upon a trail leading out into the forest and, realizing it was too small to be Allout and the Neutral's, separated from the rest in order to figure out where it was. Siren was waiting in ambush with the Insecticons."

 _I must have switched Siren's and Plasma's roles as well, or perhaps The Mentor did in order to fix my throw off,_ she mused to herself. "What color was Siren?"

"Uhm, grey femme. Why do you ask?"

"No reason. What color was Plasma?"

"Red, white and black."

 _Just like Red Alert_ , she realized. "Sorry, please continue."

He stared at her for a moment then returned his attention to his tale.

"Vibes was waiting for his return when she heard the gun shots. The Autobots swarmed forward to apprehend Plasma, who had stayed behind while her Insecticon troopers attacked Atlas. The other Autobots out in the ship heard the gun shots and came running. That was when it exploded."

She frowned to herself. The time table was off. Why? So she could save the crew?

"Atlas took them with him back to his underground base in what is now Taiwan. He gave them energon and supplies and showed them how to mine for more in the soil. When he went into the energon mines, however, he discovered the Omnicons."

"Reverb?" she began, tasting the strange emotion manifesting in her dry mouth at his name. "How much longer is this story?"

"Uh, not much longer." He promised. "I forgot to mention the Omnibots had created the energon mine tunnels long ago. They used Cerulean Miner Rats to chew up the raw energon crystals and recycle them into edible energon crystals that grew on their backs. That's how Atlas survived, by picking the energon crystals off the backs of the rats. Anyway, the Omnicons were, they explained to him, once organic. They thought themselves enlightened in comparison to their species and wished to live underground where they could live alone and in harmony. Atlas let them be after a while, realizing that they were the end process to the Vehicon's life cycle.

"So, he created five little micro machines that were similar in function and design to the Vehicon's own devices and he let them lose on the world. One, the leader of the bunch, was programmed to find one person who would sacrifice him or herself for someone else."

"It found me," she said, in the silence that followed. His screen face nodded. "But why those specific parameters?"

"Because Atlas needs someone who would risk life and limb in order to save someone else," he explained. "Someone who could lead others to do the same. He was thinking someone in the military."

"He got me instead," she said, thinking about her own familiy's history in the military. "What does he want me to do?"

"The Hivemaster I mentioned? Airachnid reprogrammed him to trap your people in their Vehicon bodies while her Insecticon army came to devourer you. He thinks he's preventing you from getting captured by the Insecticons, but he isn't. Even though Atlas programmed the machine differently, the Hivemaster has had experience with his own technology for years and we couldn't _not_ install any of the vital components, even if it meant it could prevent him from hijacking your hivelink. It seemed necessary for the process. I managed to intercept them before they could take your body and spark for their drone army." He paused. "You're lucky Atlas had the foresight of putting tracking devices in your micro machine."

She didn't say anything. "What about the others? How many are there and what are they programmed to do?"

"Only four. They are programmed to find your closest friends."

Rhythm couldn't speak over the dread in her stomach and the images of the four mechs she had known were a part of her gestalt bond, laying there in the underwater ship, unresponsive to her bond. Oracle, Rhyme, Calypso, and Hex.

_Crystal, Hope, Karena, and Allison._

"Oh my God."

"Is something wrong?" he asked, confused.

She took a shuddering breath. "Y'know... maybe, you shouldn't've gone through all the trouble, y'know?"

He tilted his helm on the screen. "What do you mean?"

"It's just something my mom said," she explained. "She said that 'Sometimes we don't meet our heroes until it's already too late. Sometimes… we have to become the hero. And it always tears us apart'." She tore her gaze away from the landscape. "What if it wasn't me or my sisters who were destined to protect this planet. Maybe we're doomed for failure. What if we aren't ready and he has to do the job for us. What then?"

She gazed at him until he looked away. "I don't know," he said at last. "I just don't know. All I know is that you're here and he's waiting for you with your new body."

Rhythm sighed. "Okay." She looked at her hands. "Just explain to me one thing."

"Okay, what?"

"How did the Omnicons escape?"

He paused, unsure how to respond. "Battle computers."

"So you installed one into me?"

"We preprogrammed one into your new design, yes. Uhm, did it's simplistic design work?"

She sighed. "Yes."

"Then what's wrong?"

"Nothing."

It was a difficult pill to swallow. Wanting to be a hero, wanting for one moment to be able to take care of herself without any outside help, and then finding out it was all a waste. She couldn't help herself out of a roll of toilet paper.

An image of the night when the gray mottled car had hit her, hydroplaning through the stormy rain, lifted her spirits.

_But I can help others._


End file.
